Quote Originally Posted by Psyren View Post
DMG 39: "An orc warband that attacks the PCs by flying over them in primitive hang gliders and dropping large rocks is not the same encounter as one in which the orcs just charge in with spears. Sometimes, the circumstances give the characters' opponents a distinct advantage. Other times, the PCs have the advantage. Adjust the XP award and the EL depending on how greatly circumstances change the encounter's difficulty."
You'll notice this mentions the "tactics" section of a monster entry exactly nowhere. Are we also to conclude that a fight with two Balors requires special EL adjustment, since that's not a listed value for their "organization" entry? You'll even note that it quite clearly says "circumstances", which is a different word from "tactics".

Quote Originally Posted by Raven777 View Post
The only thing I would posit for certain is that as an Int 24, Wis 24 being, any given Balor should have sufficient knowledge and common sense to take near optimal decisions relative to their own goals and circumstances for their unique encounter.
The really weird thing is that the conclusion of this argument is that it's totally fine for a 5-Int Dretch to do whatever the DM wants with no adjustment to EL, but cheating for a Balor to do so, because the latter has a tactics section and the former does not. If Psyren were arguing about some specific set of tactics, he might have a point, but the blanket "only the listed tactics count", when that is demonstrably not the way the designers used the monster is just puzzling.

Quote Originally Posted by Elves View Post
Also, remember this is 15-20 years ago. If you look at old threads, standards were lower in general then. We're sitting on 20 years of community knowledge.
That's only sort of true. The original Cleric Archer (the ancestor of CoDzilla) predates 3.5. Plenty of people understood how to play effectively from the beginning (the first 3.5 shapechange infinite loop predates the printing of 3.5 shapechange), it just took a long time to break through the people who strenuously insist the Fighter is fine to even the degree it's happened today.