They are a nasty bunch.

Makes me wish I could get the Psion's Sword before ToB.

Poison still kills them, all I need now are kua-toa bolts.

Moral: Don't solo against Mind Flayers. Seriously, Illithids are supposed to be feared, and with good reason. You can't expect a lone adventurer to change into their stronghold and carve them up like they were nothing more than a band of Shadow Thieves.
Mitigating factors: I would expect a solo character to be able to clear the Illithid lairs--slowly--by using such things as Chaotic Commands, lots of Summons, using Potions of Genius, Insight, and Clarity to boost his mental state prior to combat and Oils of Speed to counter the Slow, etc.

Scenario: Warrior opens a door and discovers five Mind Flayers waiting on the other side. Oddly enough, Warrior does not slam the door and run for his life, but instead walks in. The first Mind Flayer gazes into his eyes and establishes a psionic connection, through which the two mentally fence. Now, the Flayer has to establish and maintain this connection, which is taxing: Due to the stress of carrying the psionic link, the Mind Flayer has (for mental combat purposes) a -4 modifier to its INT score, so its effective INT and WIS are 14 and 9. Let us say that our Warrior has exactly those mental stats: He would therefore beat a Mind Flayer in single combat, simply because of his better THAC0, AC, and ApR. (These 'rebalanced' Mind Flayers would be less fearsome in melee combat than the current versions: Putting your mouth into somebody's brain is a lot trickier than simply shoving a knife into their gut.) Still, this Mind Flayer is not alone: It has four friends advancing on the Warrior as well, and they are free to use their abilities such as Spook and Psionic Blast (now a single-target spell). In addition, both participants in the Psionic duel are under the effects of a single Slow spell, so the Warrior, under the duress of having to having to fight a single Mind Flayer on both the physical and mental fronts at the same time, is rather handicapped when it comes to fighting off the others, nor is he going to have much luck at running away. As each melee hit drains off a point of INT and WIS, he begins losing the psionic battle as well, which means he falls victim to more and more cumulative Slow spells, while the first Mind Flayer, with a literal load taken off its mind, is now no longer Slowed at all, and steps forward to claim its prize of the temporal lobes.

Moral: Either slam the door and run for your life, have some good pets to block off the other Mind Flayers, or buff like hell first.

Chaotic Commands, don't leave home without it.

Slowly clearing out the underdark ilithid lair by CCing my Fighter/Cleric (Currently with the godly AC of -9, only the Ulitharid can hit him with any regularity)

My tactics are simple, open door with CCed Fighter/Cleric, let the flayers attempt to psionic blast him (they generally only use it once anyways), let them go invisible and try to attack him, then I have him run back to where the rest of the party is, have my sorceror cast True Sight, and then crush them with the nice Paralytic Bolts I got from the Improved Sahaugin :D (The moral? A single Illithid can't face a pounding from 6 attackers at once unless it psionic blasts the party, which it already wasted.Since they cycle through abilities, their extra abilities have come at the price of them not blasting the party every round or so.)

The only nastiness comes when on accident more than one follows you. 2 or more illithid are trouble, 2 or more ulitharid is just asking "Monster, please kill me"

[ 07-12-2005, 04:40 PM: Message edited by: Neo the Warrior Cat ]

In the vanilla game, I actually find mind flayers more problematic than dragons. I can't seem to get through the Underdark without someone getting intelligence-drained at least once. I find the Mind Flayer fight that Solaufein orders you into hard (even harder than two certain plot-critical dragons in Throne of Bhaal), mainly because they appear in position to surround you and I never think of stationing my allies outside the circle and sending one guy to talk to Solaufein. (That smells like metagaming, anyway.)

Anything that drains stats or levels kind of frightens me, even vampires. I know some people find vampires easy, but the Protection from Undead scrolls and Negative Plane Protection spells seem to wear off too fast in my game.

Intelligence Drain wears off after awhile.
Chaotic Commands protects against Psionic Blast.
Dragons are really easy if you know the uber-cheesy way to take them down ;)

Neg. Plane Protection only lasts 5 rounds.

Better idea is to have a multiclassed spellcaster character (or a paladin) wearing the Amulet of Power to go thwack vampires.

Really, these improved illithid are delightfully challenging, frustrating until you *suprise!* change your tactics.

The Alhoon, however, is a foe I could not fell. I wisely chose to leave him behind.

The best way for vamps that i found is an invisible cleric with turn undead, chunkifies the lot of them

Not if you don't have a high level cleric it doesn't.

I don't think a 10th level cleric can chunkify a vampire ;)

And here's bizarre news, my paladin has a better turn undead rating than my multiclassed Fighter/Cleric o.O

Still, having the Vamps covering in a corner will give you plenty of time to toss that Azuredge at 'em.

Meh, my Fighter/Cleric has a good enough AC (and wearing the amulet of power) to keep Vampires at bay while whacking them with the mace of disrution :D

Then my pally comes around and chucks azuredge at them while they're whacking away at my F/C.

What? The Alhoon didn't even prove the slightest challenge. An ulitharid is considerably tougher than the alhoon. And for some reason, an (the?) alhoon is worth only 10,000 xp while ulitharid are worth 19,000 xp. The alhoon barely even fought back.