[IronDragon]

I know my techniques are often cheesey but they do work.

Beholders: to deal with these nasties you need either the Staff of the Magi or a large collection of potions of invisibility, and a fully charged wand of cloudkill. (boots of speed are helpful here as well)

Turn off your AI and sequester the majority of your party well away from the action and make your mage invisible wither with the staff or with potions (the staff works much better.) sneak up on your party of beholders and gauths, when you get them in sight back up just enough for the fog of war to obscure them, preferable near a corner and sick a cloudkill on them. If you have the staff re-install it before the cloud explodes and the beholders will have no way to target you. If you are using the potion method scoot around the corner as fast as possible drinking a new potion of invisibility as you go. The beholders may wander around searching for their attacker but will not spot you as long as you remain invisible, if they can’t find you the gas bas return to the poison cloud area to take more damage.
Rinse and repeat process.

Beholders are very susceptible to backstabbing. I have found Valygar equipped with Celestial fury to be very good at picking off lone beholders. Since there is a good chance they will be stunned even if he does not finish them in one strike he has time to get a few more punches in usually enough to kill them outright.

Beholders have interesting behavior patterns. If any party member is visible a beholder will immediately start pelting your people with their vision attacks and only from a distance but when close will attempt to bite your party. Interestingly enough beholders USUALLY prefer to not waste their vision attacks on summoned creatures so if you summon up a group of creatures a group of Mordenkainen’s swords for example the beholders will prefer to bite them rather than fry them. Just keep an invisible party member nearby to direct the swords in their attack.


Mind Flayers:
I really hate these things.

Personally I never found chaotic commands to be useful (of course I can’t get spell trap to work either)

Mind flayer magic resistance usually prohibits the same cloudkill tactics that are so effective on beholders. However that does not mean the cloudkill tactic is completely useless.

Mind flayers tend to hang around circular but completely empty rooms doing nothing except petting their pet umber hulks. If a fight with mind flayers the hulks are as equally deadly with their ability to confuse. Slip down mind flayer hallways under cover of shadow (again Valyger is very god for this task) and open their doors. Opening a door while in shadows causes the message that you are leaving the shadows but you don’t actually. Using the same methods for beholders, have you mage go invisible and slip down to the room with the flayers and the hulks and launch a cloudkill into the room. It is probably best to be ready to slam the door shut on them. Mind flayers tend to be smarter than beholders and occasionally come looking for the source of the poisonous cloud and are rarely completely fooled by invisibility. Once the hulks are dead it is time to go squid hunting.

Start summoning. Undead, Mordenkainen’s swords and invisible stalkers are all immune to all forms of mind control and cannot be intelligence drained. Despite this mind flayers seem able to dismantle a skeleton pretty fast. Their job is not to kill the mindflayers but to keep them busy or bottlenecked in those lovely hallways. While the flayers are fighting the summoned creatures your party is using every ranged weapon you have to kill them. Have as many scrolls and spells of dispel magic available to de-charm or de-confuse any of your people who get zapped by the flayers.

Like every other dangerous creature it is better to lure one or two of these things out at a time rather then to charge into a room full of them.