Acid is also a fairly good fallback, since it works on non-Yugoloth fiends and all undead other than the incorporeal ones.Paladins are the ultimate champion of righteousness. It's also worth noting that cold, fire, and lightning resistances often happen together, but monsters that resist those types rarely resist force, radiant, psychic or - if the target isn't undead - necrotic damage. Rather than thinking in terms of number of resistances or immunities, it's more practical to think in terms of monster types. In short, resistances and immunities are distributed fairly predictably among large groups of similar monsters. The rest are couatls, sphinxes and demiliches. Undead make up almost all resistances and immunities to necrotic damage, and many contribute to the cold resistance totals.Ĭonstructs make up 6/10 of those psychic immunities (3 of those are golems). By "true elementals" I mean the ones that are made up entirely of their element, as opposed to elementally-infused flesh-and-blood creatures like azers, salamanders, and genies. These are generally non-biological creatures that don't need food, drink, or sleep. Undead, fiends, constructs, and true elementals make up the bulk of poison immunities. Yogoloths and oozes round out the resistances and immunities to acid. All except the shadow demon (which is still resistant) are immune to necrotic damage, and both shadow monsters are the only ones vulnerable to radiant. A few of them are immune to cold rather than resistant. Incorporeal creatures (banshees, ghosts, poltergeists, shadows, shadow demons, specters, will-o'-wisps and wraiths) also resist acid, cold, fire, lightning, and thunder (along with non-magical weapon damage). This makes sense, since they come from the chaotic plane of Limbo. There's 6 kinds of Slaadi and they're all resistant to acid, cold, fire, lightning, and thunder.
![radiant damage 5e radiant damage 5e](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601875ba3487663a1ad06c72/1616681993856-VZJZVAADGZBL5N6I6ZY8/Aspect+of+Bahamut+stats+for+website.png)
There's 11 devils, 13 demons and 4 yugoloths in the Monster Manual. Other than those, only Ice Mephits (cold) and Djinni (lightning, thunder) contribute immunities.įiends contribute a large amount of resistances and immunities to fire, cold, and to a lesser extent lightning.
![radiant damage 5e radiant damage 5e](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58eff4589f7456cb9bf2d2ec/1492727318965-YTLJ07A51JCAZR9GWJO4/Zealot.jpg)
On top of that metallic dragons are good - and thus unlikely to be fought - so in practice there's only 3 monsters with lightning immunities worth considering.Īmong elementals, fire elementals contribute disproportionately to non-poison immunities: there's 9 kinds of fire elementals, and they're all immune to fire damage. So 8/10 lightning immunities are just different ages of blue and bronze dragons. That's because dragons generally come in good/evil pairs, and each dragon has 4 stat blocks (wyrmling, young, adult, ancient). The forum post referenced in András's answer gives a quick overview of the the damage types but misses many important details about how those damage types are distributed.ĭragons contribute disproportionately to immunities for acid, cold, fire, lightning.