How common is each damage type for monsters?

[Greywander]

I'm working on my race building guide again and am trying to score resistance/immunity/vulnerability to different damage types. I know that when the PCs are the ones dealing the damage, types such as force, radiant, and psychic are top tier; types such as acid, necrotic, and thunder are mid tier; and types such as cold, fire, lightning, and poison are low tier. This is based on how common resistance and immunity pops up on monsters.

However, I don't know if the same holds true when it's the monsters damaging the PCs. This thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?379165-MM-Resistances-Immunities-Vulnerabilities-and-Damage) only shows damage output from monsters in the MM, and one thing you'll notice is that radiant damage is far more common than radiant resistance (though still not as common as a lot of other damage types). Thunder damage seems to be a lot less common than thunder resistance. Etc.

Another oddity is that poison resistance seems to be less valued than other types of resistance, even though it is probably the most common damage type, after BPS. It's almost always bundled with advantage on saves vs. poison. So it's not necessarily how common a damage type is that determines how valuable it is.

Perhaps I should rank damage types according to natural and supernatural. For example, fire and poison are very likely to be encountered under normal circumstances. Force and radiant would only ever show up when magic is being used or a supernatural creature is in play. By this logic, "natural" damage types would be acid, cold, fire, lightning, poison, and thunder; "supernatural" damage types would be force, necrotic, psychic, and radiant.

[Wizard_Lizard]

Well bludgeoning piercing and slashing are most common, Fire is pretty common too. It tends to depend on where the campaign is. In the arctic, cold is a must have.
Poison is pretty common too.

[Greywander]

I'm treating BPS damage separately from "elemental" damage types. BPS is more common than anything.

Unfortunately, how valuable a damage resistance is does tend to depend a lot on the campaign and DM. If you simply never encounter certain types of monsters, then a particular damage resistance might be next to useless. For example, I don't expect a typical Good-aligned party to fight many celestials, and therefore not to take radiant damage all that often. That's why it probably works better to use broad strokes instead of trying to assign a unique score to each damage type. A Rare/uncommon/common split would work, as would a natural/supernatural split. There's a lot of subjectiveness here. For example, I wouldn't expect PCs to take lightning or thunder damage as often as fire or cold damage, and yet these all fall under "natural" damage types.

[MrStabby]

I think for dealing damage your table is underrating things like fire damage. Sure it is resisted a lot, but then you use another type of damage. But the option of using fire damage has value based on when it is the best thing to do, given things like trolls and the relatively common fire vulnerable enemies the option of doing fire damage is more valuable than most others (possibly excepting radiant). However if it is to the exclusion of other elements rather than as an option, fire is worse. Much worse. It is pretty context dependant.

I think that resistance is less complex to rate conceptually, but its going to be more DM dependant. It is really about what your campaign faces. It also depends on environmental factors - does your DM like to have the world on fire or will you have a need to run into a burning building? Swim through deep pools of acid? I think some damage types are pretty much only ever going to come from enemies whereas others will come from other parts of the game.

[JackPhoenix]

I have a table with monsters from MM, VGtM and MToF from.... somewhere on the internet, that's all I remember. Ignoring PBS, and with no details on what does what, ignoring NPC sections:


Acid: 35
Cold: 41
Fire: 70
Force: 30
Lightning 43
Necrotic 63
Poison 68
Psychic 56
Radiant 13
Thunder 11

[Chronos]

I'm not sure that thunder is really a "natural" damage type. Sure, loud sounds are natural. But sounds so loud that they do damage? That pretty much only results from spells, or extremely high tech. Like radiant, actually: Bright light is common, but not light so bright that it hurts.

For that matter, cold damage can be natural, but it's hard to find natural cold damage that's acute. If you stay out in winter for a few hours without appropriate protection, you'll get frostbite. Make it an extreme enough winter, and that might be as low as several minutes. But when a white dragon breathes on you, you get frostbite right now. You can't even get that effect by dumping buckets of liquid nitrogen on someone.

[Greywander]

I have a table with monsters from MM, VGtM and MToF from.... somewhere on the internet, that's all I remember. Ignoring PBS, and with no details on what does what, ignoring NPC sections:


Acid: 35
Cold: 41
Fire: 70
Force: 30
Lightning 43
Necrotic 63
Poison 68
Psychic 56
Radiant 13
Thunder 11

These numbers surprise me. Both psychic and necrotic beat out acid, cold, and lightning. Thunder is still really rare.

The thread I linked to in the OP claims there are 14 monsters that deal radiant damage, and only includes the MM, so I'm not sure how you ended up with 13. Might simply be a difference of methodology, or it might include beasts or NPCs in addition to monsters.


I'm not sure that thunder is really a "natural" damage type. Sure, loud sounds are natural. But sounds so loud that they do damage? That pretty much only results from spells, or extremely high tech. Like radiant, actually: Bright light is common, but not light so bright that it hurts.

For that matter, cold damage can be natural, but it's hard to find natural cold damage that's acute. If you stay out in winter for a few hours without appropriate protection, you'll get frostbite. Make it an extreme enough winter, and that might be as low as several minutes. But when a white dragon breathes on you, you get frostbite right now. You can't even get that effect by dumping buckets of liquid nitrogen on someone.
I'm beginning to think I should just treat all elemental resistances as equal, instead of trying to grade them. Which is unfortunate, since in many cases something like radiant resistance is more of a ribbon, while fire resistance is pretty handy. But there's just too much variability. BPS resistance would of course still get their own category, since they're much more valuable.

[Wizard_Lizard]

Also it very much depends on what levels you are playing at.
Early on you'll encounter poison or acid or fire damage, but necrotic and thunder and lightning, etc tend to appear later.