Gilfalas |
Not fire. I read somewhere once that about half the monsters in the game have some level of fire resistance or immunity. It is also the most common energy attack in the game. So bad to use as an attack but great to have resistance/immunity to.
Not electricity. I would posit the second most resisted thing would be electricity. While it looks cool in the minds eye and you have that oh so tempting Chain Lightning spell up there, many things have at least some Electricity resistance.
Cold and Acid both seem like good choices. Sadly cold & acid do not have a lot of spells based on them compared to electricity or fire.
My purely anecdotal research indicates that Acid is the most usable energy of the 4 in terms of what can be hit with it effectively/to some effect.
Note that if your planning on playing an elemental school sorcerer, you can convert a spell that does any other elements damage to your elements damage at will with no level change or time increase to the spell, so that can multiply your available 'element' spells a great deal.
Example: Your an Earth Elemental School Sorc. You can change Cold, Fire and Electricity damage to Acid (earth) damage at will when you cast a spell. So if you learn 'Fireball' that means you also now know 'Acidball'. If you learn 'Shocking Grasp' you also effectively know 'Acid Grasp' and it would still get the same bonus to hit metal clad targets since the only thing in the spell that changes is the damage type and spell type. All other aspects of the spell stay identical.
Hogeyhead |
I really like electicity from a flavor standpoint, and in say dresden files where resistance is just not a thing it's really cool. Pathfinder not so much too much resistance, not enough ways of bypassing it. Especially immunity.
Of the remaning three fire as has been said no. Do not rely on fire, you will be burned. Cold is anout on par with electricity but not as cool.
Acid however, fewer things are resistant/immune, and on top of that if you are using spells many acid spells bypass spell resistance, which is huge. As has been said before Acid is generally the way to go.
Now you mentioned that you wanted to choose from the main four, however if you have the option consider the last two: force and sonic.
Force isn't an element per say, but a damage type, so it's as much an element as say bludgeoning. That being said if all else is equal force is king, nothing, nothing resists force outside of extremely circumstantial corner cases. However it is much harder to find a good force attack, which brings us to the last element: sonic.
Sonic actually is an element in the same way that fire or cold are, however it's set apart, and usually isn't an option. When it is an option there is usually some disadvantage to using it not present with the other elements. However if you can finagle sonic is very rearly as good as force in terms of nothing resists it (bards get bonuses to saves, and every once in a while something has it on it's resistance list, for some reason).
I would use sonic if you can, like say for the arcanist exploit, if not go with acid.
Squeakmaan |
I'd choose cold, because I work in Maine, and I would love to be immune to cold. I had to work outside, on an island, several days this winter. As a transplant from the South, when people said this past winter didn't even really count as winter it made me wonder why came here and stayed.