Quote Originally Posted by Telok View Post
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It's not that you need to "ramp up" the beholder. It's that shutting off the mundane's gear & buffs in T3+ is a bitch that makes them stop, recalculate stuff, wastes time, and introduces mistakes. Combined with it's abilities being either "move a bit and ignore it" or "guess what saves you're making this round" means that everything interesting about it leans on the GM setting up an interesting location. But if you've got a good location you can make pretty much any fight interesting.

Even basic zombies can be an interesting fun fight at high levels with the right scenery & set up. The corallary being that no matter how fancy the monster, if you fight it in an empty box it's probably going to be pretty dull. Ultimately beholders just aren't very interesting in a mechanical sense any more, an antimagic cone and random saves attached to a pile of hp aren't inherently interesting or fun.
I think this is a very fair critique and as a fan of martials I get going to bat for them. The antimagic cone, despite the name, does shut down the melee PCs the most.


That being said, I have run a Beholder fight as strictly a boss battle and for that I absolutely leaned into terrain and the Beholder being super intelligent/knowing its own strengths. There was a lot of narrow tunnels and verticality. I also stole some material ideas from a 2E beholder supplement on DMs Guild, mirrors that reflected eye beams and stone that disappeared and reappeared when exposed to an antimagic cone or not respectively. The first half of the fight the party was running down a zig zagging hall smashing mirrors to stop eye rays from coming down at them from around corners. When they got to the end of the mirror zig zag hallway of death they realized it opened out at the top of a huge shaft with disappearing-rock platforms and an acid bath at the bottom. Some clutch teleportation from a bard and toughing it out athletics checks from the barbarian and the party won but I beat them down pretty good from full and they had a paladin (albeit one of mercy w/ low Str who ended up being the primary target of Telekinesis) to buff their saves so it could have probably gone worse.

I also rolled the Beholder's eye rays out a day ahead of time and then came up with a flow chart and targeting priorities with the PC's sheets in hand. Beholders are super intelligent super paranoid ultra xenophobes, once they see a foe for a second or two they can assess the best wat to defeat it imo. I keep the randomness to represent the ultra paranoia but I think planning/being tricky and brutal is a very important aspect to the Beholder encounter mythos.