cold or lightning

which is the better of the two:

doing damage with it

resisting it

Depending on campaign, but cold resistance does let you auto succeed on cold environment checks. So helps with camp night comfort when blankets run short. Or when going up a mountain.

For damage, it is alright. if you have a lot of spells that deal cold, should be pretty alright. Resisting an element is always really good as eventually something is going to say, cone of cold you and taking half to begin with is great. and half of that if you succeed.

This depends on the campaign you're in: it is completely dependent on the environments the DM may take you to, and the types of monsters the DM will put you against.

I will say that when you deal damage with a certain type you can take Elemental Adept to bypass monster resistances but there is nothing stopping the DM giving this to monsters too but this less likely.

Cold resistance can benefit you in cold environments.

Too much dependence on DM and campaign to say in general terms which is "better". Just go wth whatever you think fits your character better.

Alright thanks for the tips.

I haven't updated my counts but I don't think they've changed much so I can say with some level of confidence that cold has the (very) slight advantage over lightning. They're close enough, though, that it wouldn't really matter unless you're specifically in a campaign that has a focus on one or the other.