First time fighting a Kraken is happening as I type. May I say <gulp>...

With 10 gigantic tentacles, a high intelligence, and reasonable dexterity a Kraken could effectively wield 10 guns-each huge objects similar in size to a T-rex

Using the oversized weapons rule, this comes out to 8d8 damage per massive bullet. And if we equate each tentacle attack to now firing, 3 shots, plus 3 legendary actions. 

I give you, the ultimate Glocktopus

Nah bro I will let my level 10 Group fight against this thing

it definitely didn’t used to be immune to nonmagical damage, right? that seems insane

Has anyone noticed that its bite attack does an average of 23 damage, while a roper's bite attack does just one less at an average of 22 damage? You would think that getting bitten by those ginormous teeth would cause it to inflict more damage.

How does this thing have 20 charisma? He rizzed up like my entire party and we died. Common kraken w

level 8 group fighting this ****in thing currently

*My DM* Yeah, everybody in the party is at level 2 now... seems like a good enough time to throw a kraken at them.

My DM thought to himself something like "Yeah, the party is at lvl2 now... let's see how this goes."

Quote from MasterNPH >>

I just noticed the sharks swimming by the kraken's mouth. Really gives some perspective on the size of the thing.

 HOLY SHI!

What if I made a golem miniature of this and called it a kROCKen

This seems really powerful, and then I realized if I got it above water and used meteor swarm, I have an ohko chance. Granted, it's a miniscule chance, but it's a chance.

Quote from MOMOtamagotchi >>

With 10 gigantic tentacles, a high intelligence, and reasonable dexterity a Kraken could effectively wield 10 guns-each huge objects similar in size to a T-rex

Using the oversized weapons rule, this comes out to 8d8 damage per massive bullet. And if we equate each tentacle attack to now firing, 3 shots, plus 3 legendary actions. 

I give you, the ultimate Glocktopus

 My friend is running a meme campaign, and I am praying he doesn't see this comment

Quote from The_DragonTamer >>

This seems really powerful, and then I realized if I got it above water and used meteor swarm, I have an ohko chance. Granted, it's a miniscule chance, but it's a chance.

 O wait no I'm dumb. Meteor swarm has a max damage of 240, not 480.

WhAtEvEr YoU WaNt It To MeAn

Quote from MOMOtamagotchi >>

With 10 gigantic tentacles, a high intelligence, and reasonable dexterity a Kraken could effectively wield 10 guns-each huge objects similar in size to a T-rex

Using the oversized weapons rule, this comes out to 8d8 damage per massive bullet. And if we equate each tentacle attack to now firing, 3 shots, plus 3 legendary actions. 

I give you, the ultimate Glocktopus

 Yeeeeeess

Quote from Gehennaheretic >>

Why does this not have Legendary Resistance?

Quote from Sirjeffe >>

What are the sizes for Krakens actually? It says “gargantuan” but that just means 20 feet x 20 feet Or larger. And that is very vague. 

 

I'd say 'Colossal' I know 5e did away with sizes over Gargantuan and smaller than Tiny but I still think that wasn't a good decision. It doesn't make sense for there to be gargantuan creatures that could swallow other gargantuan creatures in one gulp. Give me back my Colossal and Titanic!

 what are the rules for Colossal, Titanic, and sizes smaller than Tiny?

30 feet by 30 feet

A kraken recently came up in a campaign I'm playing in, and there was a large discussion regarding the CR of the kraken in its lair. The reason this came up is because we noticed that the kraken had a special lair action that greatly boosted its offensive capabilities, yet did not increase the effective CR of the kraken when fought in its lair. As such, I decided to do a complete CR analysis of the kraken to determine whether the lair truly did not affect its difficulty as well as how accurate its challenge rating actually was. I was also curious to see which strategies a kraken would most likely employ when force to fight a group of adventurers. Here is a full breakdown of the calculation as analyzed using the "Creating a Monster" rules in the DMG.

Since the lair does not change the kraken's defensive capabilities, we can freely calculate it defensive CR without needing to make comparisons. Due the kraken being at least CR 17, the kraken's immunity to nonmagical BPS boosts its effective hit points to 590 (using the 1.25x multiplier as specified in the DMG). According the DMG, the kraken's 5 saving throw proficiencies boost its effective AC from 18 to 22. Using these two numbers, we find that the kraken's defensive CR is 26. At high enough level play, one could argue that the immunity to nonmagical BPS should not contribute to its CR as every martial character should have magic weapons at this point or can circumvent the need through features like the monk's Ki-Empowered Strikes. From this perspective, the kraken's defensive CR is only 23.

Let us now examine the kraken's offensive CR outside of its lair. I found that calculating this CR is a bit annoying for a couple of reasons, one of which is the multitude of strategies that it can employ to deal damage. In this analysis, I will cover three kraken strategies: tentacle spam, lightning spam, and "eat everyone". I will not go over using Ink Cloud as a strategy because while it does obscure the kraken, the cloud itself does less damage to a party of 4 than using Lightning Storm and a tentacle attack from the same number of legendary actions. If the kraken were to only use its tentacles to attack, its six attacks per round (including legendary actions) would give it a DPR of 123. If it were to try spamming Lightning Storm every turn, a typical round would consist of 2 lightning storms (each targeting 3 creatures) plus an additional tentacle attack from its legendary actions, giving a DPR of 152. The DPR for the "eat everyone" strategy is more complicated to calculate, but not impossible. For the sake of simplicity, we will assume combat goes on for 3 rounds and calculate the total damage inflicted by the kraken to determine the DPR of this strategy. In order for the kraken to swallow a player, they must first have one grappled in a tentacle. Since the kraken's has no bonus to its initiative, it is very likely that there will be at least one player that will go before the kraken, allowing the kraken to use one legendary action to use a tentacle attack to grapple a player (20.5 damage). In order to eat a player, the kraken must use its full action to do so (23.5 damage). Using its remaining two legendary actions, it can use lightning storm (66 damage), which deals more damage than its two tentacle attacks. The second round sees the kraken perform the same actions again to deal the same damage, but this time, it starts its turn with a player in its stomach, dealing an additional 42 points of acid damage for the second round. And for the last round, the kraken now has two creatures in its stomach, dealing a total of 84 points of acid damage at the start of its turn. Funnily enough, this strategy ends up once again giving us a DPR of 152, the same as with the spam lightning storm strategy.

While it may seem that the best strategies are the lightning spam or "eat everyone" strategy (and tentacle spam is not worth considering), DPR alone is not enough to determine which strategy is ultimately the best. This is because the kraken has two different ways of dealing damage, making attack rolls and forcing saving throws. The kraken has a +17 to hit on all of its attack rolls, so there is basically no dodging its tentacle or bite attacks. However, Lightning Storm forces a DC 23 DEX save. While this is still a very high save, it is not wise to compare damage from attack rolls to damage dealt from saving throws when deciding which contributes to the calculation of offensive CR. Using tentacle spam, the kraken's offensive CR is 23. Using lightning spam, we find the offensive CR to be only 22, despite the fact the kraken's lightning storm has the potential to deal more damage, a direct result of the saving throw being less deadly than the monstrous attack roll. The "eat everyone" strategy is a bit more complicated to assign a CR for since the total DPR from this strategy is almost evenly split between physical attack rolls and saving throws. The DMG thankfully has a strategy for how to deal with this: "If your monster uses different attack bonuses or save DCs, use the ones that will come up the most often." Since each round the kraken makes two attack rolls and forces 3 saving throws, we must use the saving throw to determine the CR for this strategy, giving us once again an offensive CR of 22. Oddly enough, this calculation draws us to believe that the most efficient strategy for a kraken to employ outside of its lair would be tentacle spam, not touching its bite or lightning storm. However, this distinction between attack rolls and saving throws gives us an alternative "eat everyone" strategy, one where we replace the extra lightning storm with two tentacle attacks. Doing so gives us a DPR of 127 paired with a +17 attack bonus, once again yielding an offensive CR of 23. From this analysis, it appears that the most optimal strategy for a kraken outside of its lair is to use try to eat as many adventurers as quickly as possible, all while avoiding its Lightning Storm action.

It seems that when designing the kraken, WOTC decided to ignore the immunity the kraken has to nonmagical DPS, as both its defensive and offensive would equal 23 in this case. From this, it appears that the kraken is perfectly balanced for its challenge rating... at least outside of its lair.

Now we finally start discussing how the kraken's lair completely changes the kraken's effective CR, as well as how it fights. The key lair action that completely changes how this monster runs is its second lair action option: "Creatures in the water within 60 feet of the kraken have vulnerability to lightning damage until initiative count 20 on the next round." After reading through how the kraken's lair actions work, we learned that there was nothing stopping the kraken from utterly spamming this lair action every round (there is no general rule for lair actions in the Basic Rules that prevents them from being spammed). The reason the kraken never optimally uses its Lightning Storm outside of its lair is because of its low save DC. But does this change when all lightning damage the kraken deals is doubled? Looking at the lightning spam strategy again, we see that after making two Lightning Storm actions and one tentacle attack, the DPR of the this strategy goes from 152 to 284! This massive jump in damage gives this strategy an offensive CR of 28, much higher than the CR 22 strategy we calculated earlier. If we were to once again analyze the "eat everyone" strategy supplemented with Lightning Storm, we see that the DPR here increases from 152 to 218, signifying an offensive CR of 25. From this, we find that what was once the worst strategy for a kraken has become the best while in its lair. Assuming a defensive CR of 23 for the kraken, we find that the kraken's CR in its lair should be either 25 or 26, purely because of that one spammable lair action that doubles all lighting damage.

All in all, the kraken for the most part is a well designed and well balanced monster for its challenge rating. Finding that the lightning spam and "eat everyone" strategy had roughly the same DPR suggests to me that a lot of planning and attention was put in to make the kraken capable of adapting to multiple fighting styles without sacrificing much in the way of challenge. My only complaint with this boss monster comes from its lair, which does not seem to show the same amount of consideration for promoting versatile battle styles. If there was a stipulation in its lair actions that prevented the kraken from spamming one lair action or more balanced lair actions, I feel krakens in their lairs would be intuitively more interesting and balanced.

P.S. - I often hear online that krakens need legendary resistances. They don't. Their saving throws are already ludicrously high. Legendary resistances should only be give to boss creatures that have a bad saving throw modifier, such as the tarrasque whose +0 to DEX saves is easily exploited. So what if the cleric banishes the kraken due to a lucky roll? They earned it, and the kraken will just come back in a minute anyway.

But, if you're still intent on giving the kraken 3 Legendary Resistances per day, I won't stop you. Just be sure to increase its CR to 24.

i ain't reading that