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I would like to know the distribution of energy resistances and immunities in 3.5 monsters, and especially the four basic types fire, cold, electricity and acid.
It is often said that fire is most resisted, followed by cold, electricty and finally acid. But did anyone actually collect stats on this? I did not find any more reliable information than hearsay on forums.
I'm mainly interested in monsters from official WotC sources.
I counted up the number of creatures with those resistances and immunities in the Monster Manual (the first one only), and I came up with these totals:
Fire - 62
Cold - 50
Electricity - 40
Acid - 33
Here's a Google Doc with all of my information spelled out. All monsters on this list have either resistance or immunity against the listed energy type, and I didn't differentiate between the two. In this list, I did not include templates (like Skeleton or Half-dragon) and I did not include monsters that were just more powerful forms of other monsters (so each dragon color gets one entry, as does the Arrowhawk and Tojanda). The numbers would change a little bit if you included those, but not by terribly much, and I'm fairly sure that it wouldn't be by enough to change the order of which is most common. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NDEusHrX9TKlVl7aoozoz2Sy1oa5FFAODWbWmU4njEY/edit
