Eric Finley
First Post
(BUMP)
Oddly enough, while trying to fix the battlerager (my fix follows below, if you're interested) I ended up doing exactly that. Using searches from the Compendium, here are the percentages of all monster entries which are capable of various kinds of attack:
Not a lot of surprises there, exactly, but some of the magnitudes are interesting. For example, close attacks scale upward more rapidly from Heroic to Epic than area ones do; I'd have expected the reverse. More interesting yet was the amount by which resist necrotic is more valuable than even resist fire - it totally runs away with the win there. And how relatively unuseful resist cold is; I'd have expected it to be somewhat closer to fire than it is. Psychic damage is also noticeably more common than I'd have expected.
Methodology:[sblock]You can't search for [all creatures]. You need a search term. I used "vs" for this - so if there are any monsters which don't have an attack "vs" a defense (even a basic attack), well, I missed those.
The ranged/area/etc readings were based simply on searches for those exact keywords... so if it shows up in the "ranged" line, it had the word "ranged" somewhere in the monster text. This is probably only 99% accurate for finding ranged attacks, as there was no easy way to distinguish between an attack reading "Ranged 10; +N vs. blah" and a power text saying something like "When the smurfkin is the target of a ranged attack, it uses smurfity smurf as an immediate reaction." But it's a pretty good estimate anyway, IMO. These numbers do not of course add up to 100% because "ranged" counts all monsters with at least a ranged attack, it tells you nothing about whether it's also got an area attack or whatever.
With regards to damage types it was a little trickier; the individual totals are small enough that phrases like "if the pyrabbit takes cold damage, it turns into a normal bunny" distorted the results noticeably. So I had to refine the search to eliminate the two most common forms of this phrasing I could find. It's probably at that point more accurate than the previous set, but obviously there will still be false positives here and there. Luckily, the word "damage" isn't included in things like keywords and resistances, so this search is actually finding monsters capable of dealing fire damage, for the most part.[/sblock]
Oddly enough, while trying to fix the battlerager (my fix follows below, if you're interested) I ended up doing exactly that. Using searches from the Compendium, here are the percentages of all monster entries which are capable of various kinds of attack:
Code:
All %All |Hero %H |Para %P |Epic %E
Number of Entries 2133 100% |1203 100% | 683 100% | 247 100%
-------------------------------+----------+----------+---------
With ranged attacks 926 43% | 520 43% | 291 43% | 115 47%
With close attacks 898 42% | 366 30% | 368 54% | 164 66%
With area attacks 396 19% | 179 15% | 148 22% | 69 28%
With only melee 690 32% | 472 39% | 175 26% | 43 17%
With only mle/cls 1083 51% | 636 53% | 336 49% | 111 45%
-------------------------------+----------+----------+---------
Doing fire damage 258 12% | 94 8% | 112 16% | 52 21%
Doing cold damage 112 5% | 57 5% | 38 6% | 17 7%
Doing poison damage 209 10% | 105 9% | 79 12% | 25 10%
Doing necrotic dmg 417 20% | 156 13% | 175 26% | 86 35%
Doing lightning dmg 102 5% | 57 5% | 24 4% | 21 9%
Doing thunder dmg 85 4% | 34 3% | 27 4% | 24 10%
Doing psychic dmg 243 11% | 94 8% | 105 15% | 44 18%
Doing acid damage 89 4% | 42 3% | 32 5% | 15 6%
Doing radiant damage 80 4% | 39 3% | 27 4% | 14 6%
Doing force damage 70 3% | 49 4% | 14 2% | 7 3%
Doing only untyped 913 43% | 657 55% | 216 32% | 40 16%Methodology:[sblock]You can't search for [all creatures]. You need a search term. I used "vs" for this - so if there are any monsters which don't have an attack "vs" a defense (even a basic attack), well, I missed those.
The ranged/area/etc readings were based simply on searches for those exact keywords... so if it shows up in the "ranged" line, it had the word "ranged" somewhere in the monster text. This is probably only 99% accurate for finding ranged attacks, as there was no easy way to distinguish between an attack reading "Ranged 10; +N vs. blah" and a power text saying something like "When the smurfkin is the target of a ranged attack, it uses smurfity smurf as an immediate reaction." But it's a pretty good estimate anyway, IMO. These numbers do not of course add up to 100% because "ranged" counts all monsters with at least a ranged attack, it tells you nothing about whether it's also got an area attack or whatever.
With regards to damage types it was a little trickier; the individual totals are small enough that phrases like "if the pyrabbit takes cold damage, it turns into a normal bunny" distorted the results noticeably. So I had to refine the search to eliminate the two most common forms of this phrasing I could find. It's probably at that point more accurate than the previous set, but obviously there will still be false positives here and there. Luckily, the word "damage" isn't included in things like keywords and resistances, so this search is actually finding monsters capable of dealing fire damage, for the most part.[/sblock]
And, if interested, my battlerager fix:[sblock] Battlerager's Vigor (Class Feature)[FONT="]
You have resistance equal to your Con modifier to all melee and close attacks. Furthermore, anytime this resistance kicks in and you are wearing chain armor or less, you gain a +1 damage bonus to your next attack on the source of that hit, or +2 with a mace, axe, or hammer. This bonus goes away as soon as you lose real HP (not temp HP) for any reason – although if you lost them to a melee or close attack, then it comes back again as normal.
The above research was me trying to figure out whether "to untyped damage" would be a possible stand-in for "to a melee or close attack" since we're much more used to applying resistances to damage types than to attack forms. The answer is that on paper, at Heroic, it's really close... 55% of monsters do only untyped damage, 53% have only melee or close attacks. (No word, of course, on how often they may use each type of attack, but this will do as a first-order approximation.) However, I realized that there is a clumping issue here... we usually organize adventures around a theme, and the correlation between "inflicts typed damage" and "all of the same theme" is very high. So you'd have entire adventures (the war on the kobolds or whatever) which never really saw typed damage, but you'd also have entire adventures which saw nothing but. Too lumpy, and therefore discarded.
But the data's still useful... hence this post.[/FONT][/sblock][FONT="]
[/FONT]
You have resistance equal to your Con modifier to all melee and close attacks. Furthermore, anytime this resistance kicks in and you are wearing chain armor or less, you gain a +1 damage bonus to your next attack on the source of that hit, or +2 with a mace, axe, or hammer. This bonus goes away as soon as you lose real HP (not temp HP) for any reason – although if you lost them to a melee or close attack, then it comes back again as normal.
The above research was me trying to figure out whether "to untyped damage" would be a possible stand-in for "to a melee or close attack" since we're much more used to applying resistances to damage types than to attack forms. The answer is that on paper, at Heroic, it's really close... 55% of monsters do only untyped damage, 53% have only melee or close attacks. (No word, of course, on how often they may use each type of attack, but this will do as a first-order approximation.) However, I realized that there is a clumping issue here... we usually organize adventures around a theme, and the correlation between "inflicts typed damage" and "all of the same theme" is very high. So you'd have entire adventures (the war on the kobolds or whatever) which never really saw typed damage, but you'd also have entire adventures which saw nothing but. Too lumpy, and therefore discarded.
But the data's still useful... hence this post.[/FONT][/sblock][FONT="]
[/FONT]
