frankthedm said:
Not necessarily. A Frenzied Berserker can be stopped with magic. What made the encounter in this example poorly designed (unless TPK was the goal in which case it is easy to accomplish this goal in 1000 ways) was that the standard rock, scissors, paper rules were nested. To wit, one has to pre-plan against the encounter to beat it.
People bring up "Gather Information" and "Divination Spells"; guys there is nothing available at 8th level that will reliably identify "Frenzied Berserker with Deathless Frenzy class ability". You might have figured out the Beholder but the situation is almost perfectly set up that a classic "anti-beholder" approach will fail. In fact, these tactics will make a TPK easier.
In a computer game, this would be "return to last save and try again".
The problem is that the encounter needs to be done in a specific order:
1) You need to kill the beholder. Because it can fly and because it has no secondary eyes it will merely stare at the party. The Frenzied Berserker will kill them givne time so rounds are on it's side.
This means that a 7/8th level party needs to drop it with non-magical missle fire.
What is deadly about this step is versus ANY other opponent besides a FB with deathless frenzy, the opposite order is the correct tactic (kill the Half-Orc with the sword).
2) The BBEG is set up to be remarkably resistant to disabling tactics that are non-magical. Grapples are chancy at best. He is stronger than anybody else in an anti-magic field. There are no standard non-magical ways to stop him.
Therefore, magic needs to be used. Therefore the party needs to ignore him and pepper beholder. By the time that this is noticed things are likely to be bad as the encounter is already in the range of killing party members before the anti-magic effects.
3) The traps (cages) are the icing on the cake. It means that a retreat (usually the only effective plan about 3 rounds into the encounter) will almost certianly involve leaving people behind. It might not be a TPK at that point but it will be a massacre.
Superior mobility on the part of the BBEG also makes disengagment hard especially if you have speed 20 character (see no magic, above).
You can't run, you can't drop him and spells don't work. You need to kill that beholder really fast using non-magical ranged weapons. It's not clear what range of parties will actually have the resources to do this without planning.
There are also specialty tactics that could work. Mostly they require knowing the set-up as otherwise a "slugfest in an anti-magic field" is a reasonable setup for a melee heavy party. It's only when a 10th level character suddenly can't die that magical options will become essential.
