This is where Ammann shines. An illithid is not a brawler. It has Intelligence 19. It will never enter melee for a tentacle attack unless the target is already stunned. The book provides a turn-by-turn priority list: first, dominate the barbarian. Second, blast with Mind Blast . Third, only then, extract a brain. A bootleg PDF from PDFCoffee typically mangles the stat block references, making this hard to follow mid-session.
The book dedicates significant space to spellcasting monsters. It argues that enemy spellcasters should be played with specific goals in mind: the monsters know what they 39re doing pdfcoffee
