Quote Originally Posted by jinjitsu View Post
The Monster Manual even explicitly calls out not using certain creatures that have abilities your players can't handle, usually citing them as an element of the creature's Challenge rating. Their example is a rakshasa (CR 13), who lower-level characters can't even affect with spells since it's immune to spells of 6th level or lower. So fine, it's meant to fight 13th-level characters and only 13th-level+ spellcasters can hit it; but a creature whose key damage method can't be healed in any way until 7 levels after its CR? I don't think the Intellect Devourer is dangerous enough to warrant granting 9th-level XP, but there should at least be a sidebar with a caveat in there.
This is just wrong