I was reading a thread about build options in 5e (I immediately got diarrhea typing that) and someone repeated the common wisdom: “Well, fire is the most resisted damage type in 5e,” and I got pissed off again.
The only reason this is true is because the game has 800 demons and devils, every one of which is resistant or immune to fire damage. If you don’t fight demons or devils, you basically won’t encounter this problem.
I got pushback so I did the work. Here’s the numbers of every official creature in 5e with fire resistance. I’m not covering immunity, as I don’t think it’s as relevant: most categories have no creatures who are immune to fire, and those that do…make sense? (Yeah! Fire elementals are immune to fire damage!) Meanwhile, the numbers I have here do not account for the Volo’s and Mordenkainen’s “Legacy” content; I counted those monsters as one monster because you’re not going to encounter both “versions” in the same game.
So, that leaves us with hard numbers:
- Aberration: 15, 10 of which are Slaad and 1 of which is YGORL, LORD OF ENTROPY
- Beast: 2: Fiendish Giant Spider, Stench Kow
- Celestials: 4, all of which are in setting or adventures
- Construct: 7, all of which are in setting or adventures, except for the Sacred Statue possessed by an Eidolon
- Dragon: 14, which, they’re dragons.
- Elemental: 13, which shouldn’t be surprising as they’re elementals
- Fey: 7, 6 of which are in setting or adventures
- Giant: 6, 5 of which are CR 20+ titans from Bigby’s
- Humanoid: 28, 17 of which are Dragonborn, Tieflings, half-dragons, draconic sorcerers or the Fiendlock
- Monstrosity: 3
- Ooze: 8, 5 of which are gray ooze variations
- Plant: 5
- Undead: 35
That means there’s a total of 147 non-Fiend monsters with fire resistance, of which 92 you are realistically going to encounter in your campaign.
In comparison, there are seven pages of fiends with fire resistance in 5e and four pages with immunity. Now, I’m sure some of that is doubled up from the “Legacy” content, I’m not going to dig through and find it. (The fact that I can’t filter out “Legacy” content is a real fuck up on D&D Beyond’s part.) But if we ignore that, that’s 140 Fiends with fire resistance. In other words, fiends take up like 50% of all monsters in the game with fire resistance. More if you ignore all the shit you’re not going to fight (like 5 gray ooze variations).
Hope this clears some shit up.
