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The DMG on page 274 has guidelines about damage per round for monsters of each Challenge Rating. However, most monsters deal that damage as a combination of multiple attacks (and sometimes other abilities like breath weapons).

Are there statistics of average damage per attack for published monsters by Challenge Rating, for the most damaging attack these monsters have? (just Monster Manual would be OK)

To adress the questions: for clarification

  • I currently have no specific problem I am trying to solve with this, I am just curious. I could see it being useful, for example to evaluate how much damage a feat would be that granted Uncanny Dodge would avoid.

  • I originally meant attacks with an attack roll (i.e. things that say attack, like a melee or ranged attack that has a to hit), not things like area damage spells or breath weapons. This typically would exclude damage sources that need to recharge (at least I am not aware of a normal attack roll one, that has a recharge).

  • I would include extra typed damage that is the direct result of the attack.

  • I'd exclude spells, summoning abilities and secondary non-damage effects that cause things like conditions.

  • I would consider attacks lowering the hit point maximum like normal damage attacks.

  • I'd consider legendary actions if one of them dealt a higher attack damage than the normal attack.

  • I'd ignore effects that deal damage when you hit the creature.

However, an answer that included breath weapons and other damage dealing attack forms, or for some reason made another call on these would be OK for me, als long as it explains what is or is not included.

Nobody the Hobgoblin
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    Is there any use for this information beyond being trivia about a list of monsters? With questions like this you’ve asked before, you’ve always insisted “I think it’s useful”, but you’ve never explained how, that I can recall. – Thomas Markov Nov 01 '22 at 10:17
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    it could be useful for scenarios where the party has large amounts of flat damage resistance, mostly heavy armour master as it doesn't take a reaction but maybe other sources if an attack is blocked more than it deals (causing the overflow to be wasted) – Cassie Nov 01 '22 at 10:41
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    @Cassie …but how does knowing the average change anything about your decision making as a DM? – Thomas Markov Nov 01 '22 at 10:44
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    @ThomasMarkov an extremely basic part of dming is eyeballing encounter strength. knowing which CR to look at for your over- or under-optimized party should be a useful resource for any DM intending to present fights that aren't simply exercises in boredom or instant tpk. – user2754 Nov 01 '22 at 11:31
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    @user2754 Yes, and the question states they are already aware of the metric you would use for that: damage per round. Damage per round is the statistic you would use for doing the things you talk about in your comment. Not damage per attack. I want to know why knowing damage per attack means anything to Groody independently of damage per round. – Thomas Markov Nov 01 '22 at 11:39
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    An additional resource which probably also doesn't have the answer, but likely relevant nonetheless: http://blogofholding.com/?p=7338 "5e monster manual on a business card" – Erics Nov 01 '22 at 11:41
  • @ThomasMarkov A concrete recent use would have been in the question about balancing damage from a companion vs increasing their AC. To know how much a single attack can be expected to deal at a given encounter level would have been useful to me there. Even if it was just curiosity or trivia, I do not think that would make it an invalid question. It clearly is fact based and not opinion based. For comparions there are recent questions about counting the damage types in Pathfinder, which seems OK – Nobody the Hobgoblin Nov 01 '22 at 12:04
  • @Erics That is an interesting resource, thank you! – Nobody the Hobgoblin Nov 01 '22 at 12:10
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    I didn't say it was an invalid question, and I didn't say it was opinion based. I just asked why you were looking for this information, because this type of question sets off the XY alarm. Is there something you are trying to do with this information, a problem you are trying to solve with this information, that you would be better served by asking about instead? – Thomas Markov Nov 01 '22 at 12:29
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    Getting the "why" of the question would be a good addition, if expressible (and it's quite possible and ok for it to not be), but it is not necessary for answering the question. Doubly when something something appears to be idle curiosity, showing or explaining your own effort is useful (ie. you'll attract fewer downvotes). Specifically, what's preventing you from just counting over the source category you're aware of? – Someone_Evil Nov 01 '22 at 12:51
  • @Someone_Evil, I did search and found various listings of monster stats, but none of them includes this info. I will likely end up doing this myself, if nobody else has done so, but as this is a fair amount of work, I feel it is worthwhile to ask if someone already did. There are features that work only against a single attack (like the Rogue's Uncanny dodge) that make this useful for Optimization considerations. Unfortunately, the kind of question for which I think this is useful is also the kind of question on stats that gets closed as opinion based around here, so instead I ask what I can. – Nobody the Hobgoblin Nov 01 '22 at 14:15
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    Should someone try at an answer: 1) How do factor in legendary actions that cause damage? 2) How do you factor in creatures that can summon in other creatures to cause damage? 3) How do you factor in attacks that need to recharge? 4) How do you factor in creatures that are more about status effects rather than causing damage? 5) How do you factor in creatures that cause damage when someone attacks them? 6) How do you factor spellcasters with a wide selection of spells? – MivaScott Nov 01 '22 at 15:23
  • @MivaScott And all those variables demonstrate why I can't really come up with a good reason to care about this metric specifically. The Offensive CR calculation in the DMG accounts for these things (doing a better job with some than others), so they are accounted for when considering CR in encounter design, but I'm just at a loss for how one might make use of this narrow statistic. – Thomas Markov Nov 01 '22 at 15:58
  • @GroodytheHobgoblin You should absolutely give the considerations you want this for in the question, even if that ultimate question isn't stackable (say isn't a singular question at all) – Someone_Evil Nov 01 '22 at 16:57
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    On that note, your concern seems to be opinion based, while the current votes are for needs details. I would love to hear from any of those voters what details or information they think is necessary for the question to be answered (and I say that having already answered). The concerns raised above are not that, as the same comment(s/ers) point out. – Someone_Evil Nov 01 '22 at 16:59
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    Per the Help Center: "You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face." Given that "I currently have no specific problem I am trying to solve with this" this question shouldn't be here. – Mołot Nov 01 '22 at 20:14
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    Reminder to everyone to 1) be nice, and 2) take it to meta if you want to discuss site policy (such as the section of the Help Center that Molot quoted) beyond the specific context of this question. – Oblivious Sage Nov 02 '22 at 14:36

1 Answers1

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Going by the SRD, average damage levels off to the 20-30 range

I'm limiting myself to the SRD primarily because I have the monster data on JSON form (source; credit to github user tkfu). That means we can do a spot of text parsing to get the damage values.

Fortunately monster actions are reasonably well templated, so we can parse those templates and ignore the rest as non-damage (which by manual inspection, they are). I've grabbed the listed number (ie. not the dice based damage number) for simplicity. For this analysis I did count actions which used attacks but caused no damage (say only grappling) as dealing 0 damage, and ignored on hit riders even if they included damage. This analysis also ignores spellcasting and other traits which causes damage. I can't guarantee there aren't a few odd edge cases which slipped through, but there are just below 600 counted cases, so I'm not gonna sift through them manually.

The result, including both the average of the average (=listed value) of attacks at that CR† and the highest average (=listed value) for that CR, is plotted below (raw values in the markdown source):

plot of found average and max damage over CR

There's a couple of obvious things to point out, firstly the common thing at CR 12 which is an outlier as the only CR 12 monsters in the SRD are the Archmage and Erinyes. CRs 18 and 25 to 29 are simply empty. The CR 30 monster is the Tarrasque. The max values (especially at higher CRs) are going to be dominated by single use/Recharge actions (eg. Dragons' Breath Weapons).

For completeness, if you filter to solely attack rolls (which is a lot easier since you only need to look for the Hit keyword) you instead get:

plot of found average and max damage over CR

The spikeness would be in part due to the limited variety in the SRD, making the contrast between CR 11's Remorhaz's 50 damage bit and CR 12's spellcasters rather stark.

† There are different ways to average this, the usefulness will vary somewhat with what goals you have. This average of all attacks at the CR is (slightly) different to the average of attacks of creatures of that CR and certainly different to average of attacks made at certain threat levels/character levels. The latter requiring a lot more data or assumptions.

Someone_Evil
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    Thank you, this is already great! (also for the JSON link, nifty resource). Interesting that there are no monsters at all in the SRD at CR 18. In my experience from other such summaries, at CRs highter than 13 or so, there are so few entries that the results tend to be a swingy. – Nobody the Hobgoblin Nov 01 '22 at 17:24
  • @NobodytheHobgoblin CR 18 is the demilich, and it’s the only CR 18 in the MM. – Thomas Markov Dec 25 '23 at 14:33