To balance out the player's skills, now the Monsters can have one of 9 different powers:
Strong, Fast, Magic Breath, Magic Shield, Ambush, Poison, Stun, Thief, and Undead.

Many monsters don't have any powers, but you'll encounter more monsters with powers as you go farther in the game. Like player's skills, each monster that has a power only manages to use that power a certain percentage of the time. As you go farther in the game, monsters tend to be better at their powers, and to have more powers; however, monsters never have over a 75% chance of using any of their powers, and can have at most 4 of the 9 different powers.