D&D 5E Strike True: A breakdown of Monster Defenses.

[Leatherhead]

So after finally taking the plunge to buy D&D beyond, I decided to justify my purchase by using it to catalog all of the monster saving throws and AC I had access too, in order to see exactly what defenses are the best ones to target in general. Hopefully, you will find this useful.

To begin with, in order to make this an easy comparison, I am going to use the "Magic Number 14", which is explained here.
Secondly, these are not all of the D&D monsters, just the ones found in the Basic Rules, Dungeon Masters Guide (sans Avatar of Death), Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, Volo's Guide to Monsters, and Xanathar's Guide to Everything. Which is 728 monsters, so still quite a lot.

Now, for the results. (Sorry, I'm a bit lazy, and I didn't quite feel like formatting the data directly for the forum)

Notes:
I divided the list into easier to handle Tiers. Tier 0 is for the mooks from CR 0 to CR 1/2. Tier 1 is CR 1 to CR 4. Teir 2 is CR 5 to CR 8. All the way up to Tier 6, which is everything CR 21 and above (because there isn't that many of them). I also included the numbers for Cover, because not many people realize just how good Cover is.

Tier 0
Hardest to Softest: DEX CON WIS STR AC CHA INT
All of the fractional CR monsters go here. Fun fact, the monsters you most want to AoE tend to rely heavily on their DEX save to protect them. This is the only tier at which DEX Saves are the least desirable to target.

Tier 1
Hardest to Softest: CON STR DEX WIS AC CHA INT
Not only does this tier feature the most monsters (235!), it's also the tier of play that most Players will be Playing at. So basically, this is the "Real Deal" for most people's D&D 5E experiences. The surprising thing? WIS isn't all that strong here, despite what common knowledge would tell you, hitting something in it's WIS is only slightly harder than hitting something's AC (unless it has cover).

Tier 2
Hardest to Softest: CON STR DEX WIS AC CHA INT
This tier is mostly the same as the previous one, which means the first half of the game is largely consistent in how you want to fight things (well, except for mooks).

Tier 3
Hardest to Softest: CON WIS STR CHA AC INT DEX
Finally, WIS starts to live up to it's hype, just in time for most people to stop playing. CHA just comes out of nowhere, and DEX falls from being a Hard target to the Softest of targets.

Tier 4
Hardest to Softest: CON CHA WIS STR DEX AC INT
Tier 4 features lots of boss monsters, and it shows, as CHA suddenly surges into a top position (because 5e really has this CHA=Powerful kind of theme for some reason). STR, DEX, AC, and INT settle on their positions from here on out.

Tier 5
Hardest to Softest: CON CHA WIS STR DEX AC INT
From here on out, there just aren't that many monsters, and as a result, the math might not quite be good enough to make judgements from. But then again all of these monsters are "BBEG-Worthy" and as such, your characters should be preparing for them via in-game methods that would be far more effective than just looking at their weakest saving throw.

Tier 6
Hardest to Softest: CON WIS CHA STR DEX AC INT
The Final SuperBoss Tier, you are not very likely to fight any of these monsters, let alone multiple of them. The math here is the least likely to be useful to you, but at this point I had done so many of them that I figured "Why not?"

 

[CapnZapp]

This subject is fairly frequent. Like all before it, it fails because very few to no actual campaigns feature "average" monsters.

As a curiosity, fine. But anyone that truly needs the sort of "help" given here should not use it.

(Any minmaxer worth her salt knows that you only need to minmax your DM, not his monsters...)

 

[Zardnaar]

Interesting breakdown. We had figured out con spells and similar effects are bad. Double strike on poison and cold effects. Weak damage types and a common save/resistance/immunity.

 

[Leatherhead]

This subject is fairly frequent. Like all before it, it fails because very few to no actual campaigns feature "average" monsters.

As a curiosity, fine. But anyone that truly needs the sort of "help" given here should not use it.

(Any minmaxer worth her salt knows that you only need to minmax your DM, not his monsters...)

Consider instead, using this from the other side of the DM screen. As a tool to help build monsters.

 

[CapnZapp]

Consider instead, using this from the other side of the DM screen. As a tool to help build monsters.

If you're interested to see "what niche isn't well populated", yes, maybe. But as I said, that's a curiosity. Much more important: don't create a monster just because you want more, say, Strength saves. A monster should be created from an interesting or cool idea first and foremost.

If all you want is "time for the heroes to practice making Strength saves, they haven't done that in a while" or whathaveyou, it's easy to search the monster manual for that: Aboleth for a high-level party or Vine Blight for a lon-level one.

Just saying: players should chill. This sort of analysis isn't needed, since it can't provide any benefits in actual play, since there's no such thing as an "average" campaign. Treat it as a fun curiosity, as I said. Not even in a campaign featuring random wandering monsters does this sort of info come anywhere near "useful", since no such table of random monsters say "Look at Monster Manual page 4. Now roll 1d228* to randomize each encounter from that table of contents completely randomly."

*) Since I got this number off of the internet, feel free to treat it as a made-up number if you think it is wrong.

I hope you see my point, and that I am in no way upset about this thread (or the ones similar to it).