How to deal with mind flayers?

[Maracas]

Hey all.

I've tried almost everything, buffing up to the point of being just silly as well as summons, and it's always same result 3 mind flayers vs my party of 6 = 3-4 dead chars.

What are the tactics?

[TomJoPlays]

Tank with summons, skeletons are exellent against mind flayers. Berserk ability and the level 5 priest spell, Chatoic commands if you prefer to fight them yourself.
This tactic is also good against undead enemies with level drain.

[Maracas]

Only problem is they eat my skeleton warriors brains within seconds, that's the first thing I tried.

My charname is Berserker (9) / cleric (15) with 19 wisdom so it's not like they're faulty summons

Level drains are dealt with by Minsc with updated mace of disruption and charname with the Amulet with level drain protection and shield + flail of ages.

These are the underdark Mind flayers and not the temple district ones.

Chaotic commands and berserk only made me immune to the hold spells, my guys still got absolutely minced by them.

[voehringer_nitron]

They drain several points of INT with each hit, and if any stat hits 0, you die. Skeletons used to be immune to brain drain, as they should be, but one of the updates seemed to change that.

You need to hit them fast and hard, and hope the summons can distract, or even damage, the flayers enough for you to kill them. If you can stay behind the summons and use ranged weapons, or two handed ones (which have more reach), maybe you can get some licks in safely.

[S'up]

I used to just cast Chaos and kill them with ranged weapons, targeting those who succeeded saving throw first. Cast haste on you party, tank the psionics with whoever can with chaotic commands or whatever, cast Chaos on them, then kite them with some control. If you have no mages in you party, then I strongly recommend you to get one because BG is all about magic, rly.

[Soteria]

My strategy is to send a single skeleton forward to take all the mind blast spells (or whatever it's called that stuns/holds you). They're immune to that. They usually get killed before too long after that, sadly. After that I go in with lots of cleric buffs and haste and kill them quickly. Keep an eye on your melee characters and pull them out if their int gets low.

[creslyn]

Mordenkainen's Swords + haste.

[Maracas]

My party consists of:

Berserker 9 / Cleric 15
Keldorn
Minsc
Jaheira
Nalia
Imoen

they're all around lvl 15ish being in the underdark and being my original party

[cruc1atus]

Wand of Cloudkill, run away and hide (ideally behind a closed door) while they choke. One may follow, but divide and conquer, right? Repeat til done.

[Maracas]

Does it have to be a wand of cloudkill? I got the spell on both my mages and the flayers are immune to it.

[creslyn]

Mords swords are immune to both psionics and int drain. They're the simplest and easiest way to deal with mind flayers. Drop one or two, haste up, follow them in.

[Maracas]

Tried a Mord sword, not hasted though, it lasted a couple of seconds

[groo]

Those swords should be immune to physical damage, what happens to them? Are you nuking your own swords with spells?

[wendigo211]

They're pretty squishy, I've generally used a Chaotic Commands protected warrior with Celestial Fury and sent him in solo. That works on Insane difficulty, I haven't tried it on LoB though.

Negative Plane Protection should prevent attribute damage, although I might be mixing up the 2nd and 3rd edition versions of that spell.

[Maracas]

Originally posted by groo:

Those swords should be immune to physical damage, what happens to them? Are you nuking your own swords with spells?

They don't seem to be, I tried sending in the swords first with a wizard eye just to monitor it, and they just chewed up the swords, with physical damage.

[creslyn]

Mords swords are 100% immune to all damage types except magical, do you have any mods installed that affect creatures or their tactics/encounter challenge? Maybe something thats affecting the damage type mind flayers do?