Slaved said:
In a game with psionics characters/creatures with evasion will be much more likely to want cold resistance. That seems like a reasonable response to me.
Only if they experience Psionic characters on a re-occurring basis.
Slaved said:
Electricity is great because it is not a very common resistance plus it can break through SR better which becomes very important. Depending on the majority of enemies in the campaign this could come into effect from level one.
It is a common misconception that Electricity is not a very common defense. This misconception probably stems from the fact that Devils do not have any form of special resistance against Electricity (which definitely skews the number of creatures with some form of defense towards fire, cold, and acid somewhat).
However, the number of different creatures from the SRD are:
Resistance:
Elec 21
Fire 29
Cold 31
Acid 22
Sonic 7
Immunity:
Elec 53
Fire 84
Cold 68
Acid 64
Sonic 0
Vulnerability:
Elec 0
Fire 40
Cold 64
Acid 0
Sonic 0
Note: Celestial template add a bunch of creatures that are resistent to acid, cold, and electricity, but the SRD does not list them out.
Note: Fiendish template add a bunch of creatures that are resistent to cold and fire, but the SRD does not list them out.
As can be seen, Fire, and Cold, and Acid (in that order) appear on the surface to have resistances and immunities more often than Lightning. However, this is drastically inaccurate and misleading in the case of Psionics.
The vast majority (95%+) of the Vulnerabilities against Cold and Fire are those where the creature is Immune to the other. That means that the Immunities for those creatures means virtually nothing in the game against Psionic characters (and in most cases, it is easy to tell that a given creature is a Fire creature and Vulnerable to Cold, or vice versa). Those creatures are cannon fodder for Psions.
If we subtract these super vulnerable to Psionics creatures out, it becomes:
Elec: Immune 53 + Resist 21 = 74
Fire: Immune 44 + Resist 29 = 73
Cold: Immune 4 + Resist 31 = 35
Acid: Immune 64 + Resist 22 = 86
As can be seen, Acid comes in first and Electricity comes in second (with it also having more Immune creatures than Fire since Immunity is better than Resistance).
And, Electricity is a very sub-par option even against the super vulnerable creatures that we subtracted out (Cold or Fire is huge instead).
With Vulnerabilities taken into account, the real order of best and most defenses against Psionics changes from:
Fire, Cold, Acid, Electricity, Sonic to:
Acid, Electricity, Fire, Cold, Sonic.
Electricity is also terrible for Psions since mathematically it almost always averages less damage (see post 99), even when SR (and even Resistance) is taken into account.
All in all, a Psion should almost never choose Electricity unless he knows for a fact that a very specific type of creature (like possibly a Devil or certain types of Dragon) is the target. The SR and Saving Throw bonuses are mostly smoke and mirrors for the vast majority of creatures (nearly all of them) when it comes to average damage.
Electricity is not a great choice. It is typically the worse choice for Psions (second worse, Sonic is typically the worst).
