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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6679459" data-attributes="member: 6787650">Traditionally (in AD&D), the point of the anti-magic ray was pretty much what you identify in your second scenario: you use it to segment the party into magical and non-magical segments, and then you mostly ignore the non-magical region while your eyestalks tear the magical region to shreds. It's similar to how PCs in 5E use Wall of Force: in and of itself it doesn't do much but it allows divide and conquer tactics.That kind of segmenting doesn't work as well in 5E IMO due to the extreme mobility of 5E PCs, e.g. wizards can now move in the same turn that they cast spells, so if any party member is vulnerable to eye rays, other PCs can just move to the same spot and zap the beholder from there. In 5E, the main use of the anti-magic ray that I've found is to protect minions. A beholder with a dozen hobgoblins is really nasty to fight in broken terrain: you can't Fireball them due to anti-magic, and if you bring up a Sharpshooter or something to kill them, he's always at risk of being checkmated by the beholder's alpha strike. And you can't just kill the beholder in melee through Darkness because the hobgoblins will be hitting you instead for 80-100 points of weapon damage per turn.In short, the anti-magic eye adds versatility. There have in the past been beholder variants which can shoot through their own anti-magic regions, but I would raise the CR on those significantly (CR 16?) and give accordingly more XP.</blockquote>

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