Not Even Close

So attempt two at defeating my epic level 3.5 party didn't go over as well as expected. The first thing they faced was the Great Wyrm Gold Dragon like I planned, and it held them off pretty well for a while. I had him standing in a ring of protection spells, like protect from evil and such, and that kept the Fiend of Possession living in the Berserker's sword away for a good while. Holy Word seemed to work extremely well against them, if only because it has the chance of banishing the fiend for 24 hours (which it didn't), but after I buffed up the dragon and debuffed down the party, he didn't have much to hit them hard with and the Berserker killed him the next turn anyway.



Then the Mindflayer Sorcerer riding a Great Wyrm Black Dragon Dracolich (as per the poll results) flies in before they have time to heal and starts messing with them. I made the mistake of not keeping them far enough away because I wanted them to be close enough to cast Earthbind and Grease (25 ft range) on the Berserker, but unfortunately he frenzied and the fiend cast enlarge on him (making him around 50 ft tall) and cut the gap between them too fast.

My major problem throughout the fight was keeping the Master of the Unseen Hand (who is an incorporeal ghost) from picking the Mindflayer up off the Dracolich and flinging him into the air. He failed twice, then the Berserker killed the Dracolich, but the Mindflayer had his phylactery so he just instantaneously took over the Gold Dragon's body and kept going. As they were about to make a run for it, the ghost cast flesh to stone on the Mindflayer and he failed his save, so he turned into a statue and then was thrown from the dragon's back by the same telekinesis spell that was giving me problems earlier. He fell to the ground as the Dracolich was fleeing, but didn't die, and the Dracolich just left him there with his phylactery in a panic.

So they broke off the Mindflayer's stone limbs and threw him in a bag of holding to turn back to normal and interrogate later, and possibly use the phylactery to try and control the Dracolich, but I probably wont let him show up again for a while anyway. So my main problems with fighting this party has been mostly just being able to cause damage to them in the short amount of time before the Berserker destroys whatever it is I send. He has pretty much no AC, so it's not a problem of hitting him, but more like getting around all the abilities and items he has to avoid damage, like a ring of blinking, where half the time any attack just misses him completely. He's also immune to anything except magic weapons or spells, and has a ridiculously high fortitude save, as well as being unable to die from instantaneous death effects (which I think would be a cheap shot anyway).

I think I need to find a way to force the fiend and the ghost out of the Berserker's body and just deal with them head on, because without them, the Berserker is manageable. Only the fiend is evil aligned, the ghost is true neutral, so protection from evil works on only one of them, and as long as the ghost is ghost riding inside the Berserker's body I can't really target him directly. I also need to find a way to make a monster immune to telekinesis and flesh to stone, because that was super annoying. Anyway, thanks everyone for your help and for voting in the poll, I'll have a new one up really soon in preparation for next week's session.