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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6771972" data-attributes="member: 4937">Throughout D&D's history, a single static monster on a 'tournament field' - that is some sort of small flat bounded surface like a typical dungeon room - goes down hard, usually in about a round and a half, to any well equipped party.   So, you had a beholder on a 'tournament field' and it went down hard.  Why this should be a surprise I don't understand.   In particular, your are 12th level party against what is probably an equivalent level foe and your party is in the favorable situation.If you want a monster to be challenging, you have to take it off a 'tournament field' and put it into an environment that plays to the monsters strengths.  If the DM had intended this monster to be challenging, he failed at the level of encounter design.   My preferred encounter area for a Beholder would be a large and tall room with a large number of scattered pillars that reach halfway up the room.   The Beholder has crafted this room by using his disintegrate ray to either remove a large portion of the floor (leaving only the pillars) or a large portion of the ceiling.   Either way, the Beholder begins atop a pillar in the middle of the room and has a number of charmed monsters of some sort (monstrous scorpions maybe) located at the base of the pillars.General strategy:1) The Beholder can fly freely about the room, and uses this to try to avoid getting into melee with anyone dangerous.  It knows that the most obvious way to counter this is with magical flight, but it has an anti-magic ray that can shut that down.   2) The Beholder is most dangerous when it can separate the party and use 6 or more rays in a single round OR use its anti-magic ray to shut down spellcasters while whittling down the rest of the party with 3 rays.  So it tries to get itself flanked without getting into melee, stays at a decent range and uses pillars to provide partial cover from missile fire, and tries to use charmed monsters for distraction.3) The three most useful rays are Disintegrate, Finger of Death, and Telekinesis.  Both Disintegrate and Finger of Death come pretty close to save or die, and they have the very useful property of dealing significant damage even if the save is successful.  Telekinesis does two things for you.  First, it gives you battle field control by letting you bulrush or fling melee types that are using non-magical means (climb, jump, etc.) to get close to you.  In the case of the room of pillars described above, fling people also involves dropping them from height.  Secondly, it's the only eye ray you have that can make attacks into your anti-magic field or into an off arc.  The way to do this is to leave scattered around your battlefield sufficient loose rubble to fling about.  By using telekinesis to fling a bit of rubble (or the corpse of a monstrous scorpion!) you can attack someone that you're main eye ray has shut down, or which would otherwise not be in a valid 90 degree arc.Your DM doesn't appear to understand the monster, since he used the same ray 3 times.  Each ray is only usable once per round.  However rays are useable as free actions, so it can do its full 40' move will firing off rays.   So you might have a round where it uses anti-magic ray in the arc of a melee attacker (negating part of their AC and their ability to do damage), fires sleep at the lowest will save target not in the anti-magic ray, fires disintegrate and finger of death at a wizard potentially killing the wizard or at worst forcing the cleric to spend an action healing, then tries to bite the melee attacker, and then moves off 20' to avoid a full attack action the next round (and possibly now shutting down more attackers with its anti-magic ray), then flings a boulder at the melee attacker by aiming the telekinesis eye ray at a different part of the room.  That ability to generate a large number of actions per round is what makes the beholder potentially dangerous.  4) Anti-magic ray is huge.  There is rarely a situation where it should be closed, and that's basically only when its got good reason to believe it can't be targeted by attacks in the round.  Remember that most parties of this level are relying heavily on their gear to generate damage.  If you are unavoidably in melee with something, consider making a 5' adjustment to put that character in a different 90 degree arc and the putting it in your anti-magic ray while harassing the rest of the part with eye rays.   A paladin in an anti-magic ray can't smite, will lose his enhancement bonus to strength, will lose the bonus of his magic weapon, will lose whatever spell buffs he's using to boost damage (divine favor, divine might?) and will generally cease to be an immediate threat.  You can definitely survive the 10-20 damage a magic-less melee attacker is going to do.  Raging barbarians might be a bigger problem, but even if you can just limit the damage you are taking to the Barbarian's 30 damage a round (probably less if its under anti-magic ray), you are still going to last 3-4 rounds.   The next thing to point out is that a flying creature doesn't need to sit near a raging barbarian for 3-4 rounds unless for some odd reason its chosen to live somewhere it can't fly (which in the case of a Beholder is ridiculous, since it can carve its lair to suit it).  Float 20' straight up.</blockquote>

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