Running the numbers on elemental adept.
Elemental adept is a feat that I’ve generally given a hard time and found difficult to recommend. However, I’ve never actually run the numbers on this feat. As with other character options, it only felt fair to give it a chance and actually calculate the impact of the feat.
Which brings me to this article. I’ll be using the powers of mathematics and logic to determine whether my maligning of this feat is justified.
How does elemental adept work?
Here’s the full feat listed in the 2024 Player’s Handbook:
“Ability Score Increase. Increase your Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma score by 1, to a maximum of 20.
Energy Mastery. Choose one of the following damage types: Acid, Cold, Fire, Lightning, or Thunder. Spells you cast ignore Resistance to damage of the chosen type. In addition, when you roll damage for a spell you cast that deals damage of that type, you can treat any 1 on a damage die as a 2.
Repeatable. You can take this feat more than once, but you must choose a different damage type each time for Energy Mastery.”
Player’s Handbook 2024 p203
Note that it works pretty much the same in both D&D 5e 2014 and 2024. The only difference is in the 2024 rules, it’s a general feat and receives an ability score increase whereas in the 2014 rules, it doesn’t.
There are 2 main features to be aware of with this feat:
- Spells ignore resistance of the chosen damage type (but not immunity).
- Spells of the chosen damage type turn damage rolls of 1s into 2s
How helpful is ignoring resistance?
To work this out, we can start by looking at the Monster Manual to see how often these damage types are resisted. Percentages show the proportion of monsters in each Monster Manual that have resistance or immunity to that damage type.
| Damage type | 2014 monster resistances | 2014 Monster immunities | 2024 monster resistances | 2024 monster immunities |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acid | 19 (4%) | 15 (3%) | 22 (4%) | 18 (4%) |
| Cold | 48 (11%) | 24 (5%) | 64 (13%) | 22 (4%) |
| Fire | 40 (9%) | 43 (10%) | 49 (10%) | 47 (9%) |
| Lightning | 37 (8%) | 20 (5%) | 35 (7%) | 19 (4%) |
| Thunder | 16 (4%) | 2 (0.4%) | 12 (2%) | 4 (1%) |
While I’ve included immunities above, it’s important to be aware that elemental adept doesn’t bypass immunities. So while fire resistance/immunity is the most common of the above damage types, it’s actually cold resistance that’s more common affecting 11%/13% of creatures depending on your edition.
This means though, that whatever damage type you choose, it’s not going to come up an awful lot unless you happen to be doing a campaign set somewhere where that resistance is common.
On top of this, is the fact that the best spells are probably spread across various damage types. For instance, you might choose cold damage, but fireball is one of the best spell options around.
Finally, I think that damage resistances when they do come up, aren’t overly problematic if you’ve chosen spells well. Having a range of damage types in your repertoire means it should be easy to overcome a resistance if you need to.
That’s not to say that when this works, it isn’t effective. I think it is. That’s half the damage you’d have lost against an enemy gained back again. But this will work so rarely, and is so easily bypassed, that I don’t think it’s a worthwhile benefit.
How effective is the damage increase?
The lacklustre impact on resistances might be alright if the damage boost is sufficient enough though. So let’s run some numbers.
Let’s say I cast scorching ray. That’s 6d6 of damage which means the average number of 1s I’ll roll is 1. That means an increase of 1 damage to my spell. Now scorching ray is only a 2nd level spell. Maybe this gets better as we cast higher levels spells.
we could look at something like fireball with 8d6 and multiple targets. I’ll average 1.3 1s per casting, but this will affect multiple targets. We can see the impact on damage it has as the number of targets increases:
- 1 target – 1.3
- 2 targets – 2.7
- 3 targets – 4
- 4 targets – 5.3
- 5 targets – 6.7
- 6 targets – 8
- And so on
This still isn’t a lot, even when hitting a lot of targets. It remains 1.3 extra damage per target on a spell that already averages 28 damage per target. Sadly, this will rarely be enough to make a difference.
We could however, look at spells that roll d4s for damage. This usually means more dice, but also means a higher chance of rolling a 1. Vitriolic sphere fits in this category, dealing 15d4 acid damage with an AoE. That’s 3.75 extra damage per target which scales average damage as follows with the number of targets:
- 1 target – 3.75
- 2 targets – 7.5
- 3 targets – 11.25
- 4 targets – 15
- 5 targets – 18.75
- 6 targets – 22.5
- And so on
At least this makes a meaningful impact on damage. However, it’s worth noting that this is a 4th level spell so you’ll never have many of these to use in an adventuring day. It also deals acid damage, which is one of the poorer options for bypassing resistances. It also happens to be the only decent way of dealing more than a measly 1-2 damage per target that I can find from the spell lists.
If we compare this to something like the great weapon mastery feat, which adds 2-6 damage to each great weapon attack (depending on your proficiency bonus), elemental adept is just weaker and less reliable. Most classes will be dealing 2 attacks per turn with this and no other pre-requisites to cause the damage. If you’re a fighter, this goes up to 4 attacks at higher levels.
Is elemental adept worth taking?
No, I don’t think so.
At times, it can be impactful. But those instances are so rare, often require a lot of effort to create, a fair bit of luck or could have easily had the issue bypassed another way without using a feat. I’m just not convinced this is a good feat.
What do you think of elemental adept? Have you had more success using it on your character? Let me know in the comments below.
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I’m considering the feat as I’m playing order of scribes and I’m wondering if it’s a feat best suited to that subclass.
The subclass ability to replace the damage type of a spell with the damage type of another spell you know of the same level seems to synchronise well with the feat, potentially allowing you to pick the most ‘powerful’ damage dealing spell at that level, change it’s damage type to the type you selected for the feat and then ignore resistance and 1s that you roll.
It definitely synchronises well for order of scribes and think this is probably one of the use cases where you can do reasonably well with elemental adept (as you can tell above, I’m not a huge fan of it in general).
But your approach gives it the flexibility to be used across a lot of spells rather than the odd one here and there. Your challenge though will still be making sure you’ve got spells of the right damage type at various level so this can be applied to a lot of the spells you cast which can box you in a bit.
Of course, if you think it’ll be fun and it works well for your character, then that’s the most important thing.