A while back, I thought it would be amusing to plug all the D&D 5e damage spells into a spreadsheet and see what damage types were more common and at which spell levels. And it’s been a long, stressful couple months, and these are the things I do to amuse myself, so I thought I’d have a peek at Pathfinder for something similar.
So. I went through Archives of Nethys and put all the PF2e spells available on the main 4 spell lists into a spreadsheet, arranged by spell rank, to examine the damage types. I can’t show you a screenshot of this spreadsheet, because it’s huge and evil and wouldn’t fit, but here’s a piece of it:
I’ve noted the spell lists each spell is available on in brackets after it. This is because, unlike 5e where I’d have to go through all the class lists individually, PF2e has just four spell lists, for the four traditions, which made it a lovely vehicle to study the damage types prevalent in each of those schools. Which I decided to focus on.
Now. Some caveats. I picked the right wrong time for this, while PF2e is in the middle of the remaster, so there’s some weirdness.
Firstly, I’ve been using the remastered damage types, which are mostly the same until we get to the fancy ones at the end: void/negative, vitality/positive, spirit/alignment. I’ve used the new terms (void, vitality, spirit) and wherever an old spell on AoN had one of the old terms, I just swapped it to the new one as in the remaster guidelines. Give we’re mid-remaster, I’m not sure how many of these spells will be sticking around in their current form, but I’m just going on what I’ve got now.
Secondly, some spells deal damage in funky ways. I’m not counting spells that transform you into something that’s going to deal one of the physical damage types, for example, but the lines are a little blurry, since I used the Mantle spells, for example, which could be argued there. I also included spells that do bleed damage, even though that’s almost always only on a crit fail on the enemy’s part, so bleed damage is its own little category with its own little rules.
There’s also a bunch of multi-damage spells that are included for all the damage types they deal, so they’re in there multiple times. I’ve also put the spell in at the rank it first appears at, not counted them for every rank they can be learned at, which has resulted in at least one case where the spell doesn’t deal one of the damage types it’s listed until a higher rank than the one it’s listed on. I cannot remember which one this is, but the damage types by spell rank might be slightly skewed because of that. I think it’s only the one spell where that happens, though?
Right. With that out of the way, some results!
The most popular damage type, by far, is … not fire damage, for a nice change from 5e. Fire damage is the second most popular damage type. First place actually goes to bludgeoning damage in PF2e. There are a crap tonne of water, earth and wind spells that just smack you around. The top five overall damage types, in order of top to bottom, are bludgeoning, fire, piercing, mental and poison.
The three least common damage types are vitality/positive, force, and sonic. I had expected spirit/alignment damage to be down here, but that is actually not in the bottom five. Although, granted, because I’m using the new terms, all alignment damage is getting bundled together. If I’d still had it separated out into good or evil damage, they’d likely be lower. Poor sonic damage doesn’t get a good showing, rather like it’s cousin thunder damage in 5e.
When we split the spells out among the four traditions, it gets kind of interesting. (Note here, each tradition counts all the spells it has available, so spells appear in multiple traditions).
Arcane and Primal have very similar, but not identical, profiles for damage types. Both favour bludgeoning, fire, piercing and poison. If you want to throw acid damage, though, you’re better with Arcane, and if you want to throw cold damage, you’re better with Primal. Although surprisingly, the Divine spell list also has a decent number of cold spells.
Going through this list, I’m developing a slight aggravation at the Arcane spell list in general, because it just has more of everything except the more esoteric damage types. It’s the closest to the overall damage type profile. Because wizards get all the bloody love.
Both the Occult and Divine lists are weighted heavily towards mental and void damage. Divine obviously has more focus on spirit and vitality damage, while Occult is the only list with a strong sonic showing, which I’m presuming is because it’s the bard’s spell list.
The lowest damage type in each tradition is also fascinating. Primal gets absolutely zero mental spells. Not a single one. Druids don’t mess around with that mind-magic bullshit. And Divine, fascinatingly, has zero poison spells. Which is such an interesting choice, thematically. It has void damage, and mental, it can absolutely rot you from the inside out spiritually and psychically, but not physically. No weapons of physical ill-health.
Arcane’s lowest type is spirit, which makes sense. The raw forces of magic don’t care about good and evil, they care about possibility. It’s low on the esoteric types in general, with vitality and force also on the bottom of its totem pole (though void, because it’s spooky and cool, gets higher). Occult also disdains vitality/positive damage, presumably because occult is mostly in favour of the sorts of creatures usually damaged by that. Occult also disdains the cold, which I find slightly hilarious. What, no deathly chill? Pansies.
I do still find it fascinating that Divine has a decent smattering of cold spells. Swallow Light, Chilling Darkness, Moonlight Ray, Eclipse Burst, Moonburst. Definitely a theme of the cold and the dark in there. I’m assuming its partly because of some of Pathfinder’s more popular deities, like Desna, the Black Butterfly, and Zon Kuthon, who have a bit of a ‘void of space’ sort of theme.
In terms of damage types across spell ranks …
If you want to have a fresh new spell that deals acid damage at most spell ranks, pick Arcane. If you want a decent choice of elemental or physical damage spells across spell ranks in general, Arcane or Primal. Also poison. I do find it weird that Arcane gets more poison spells that Primal does, and across a better range of spell ranks too.
If you want spells that do mental damage, Occult is your first choice. Both Arcane and Divine dabble a bit, but Occult gives mental damage pride of place. If you want to do void damage, it’s also up there, although Arcane is very close behind it, and Divine beats it soundly.
The Divine list, as is often the case with god-adjacent lists, is very specialised, and doesn’t do a lot that isn’t void, spirit, vitality or mental damage. Or force. I’m gathering that in PF2e, force is less ‘raw magical force’, and more … well. Before the name changes, I would have guessed that force would have been the closest to what I’d consider ‘spirit’ damage? Arcane doesn’t touch the stuff much, but Divine has most of it, followed by Occult.
In general, if you want spell options for most damage types at most levels, you want the arcane list, followed by the primal list. The other two are very specialised. I think I prefer the primal list, myself, and not just because I’m irrationally peeved that wizards get all the love. That being said, they do share a lot. Typing the spells into the main spreadsheet, a lot of them have (AP) after them, because Primal and Arcane just have a lot of the same (damage) spells. Divine and Occult, while they do share a fair amount, are further from each other than Arcane and Primal, they have different priorities. Occult is sort of half between Divine and Arcane, with some things, like the wealth of sonic and mental spells, all its own. Primal does borrow a bit more from Divine as well, making it a bit of the opposite corner of the diamond.
And, some last general thoughts:
Cold damage needs more goddamn love! Every goddamn game. I’m beginning to irrationally hate fire damage almost as much as I irrationally hate arcane/wizard spell lists. Sonic/thunder also needs more love. And acid! Acid is mean, use it more!
I’m a bit surprised by poison damage. While it is high in terms of number of spells, it tends to feel very specialised? Almost like bleed damage. It’s its own little thing off to the side.
Speaking of bleed, one thing I do find amusing is that Primal favours it. Arcane technically has more spells that deal bleed damage, but within Arcane’s own internal rankings, bleed occupies the same place as it does for Divine and Occult, eleventh most popular, while Primal, even though it was one less bleed spell quantitatively, ranks bleed damage as three spots higher, eighth most popular. Primal also ranks slashing damage higher than anyone else. Primal is the school that just most wants to physically mince you, you know? Smash you and slash you and stab you and bleed you. Lets kick this old school, with tooth and claw and razored coral growths and giant stone teeth from the ground. Heh. I like the Primal list. It’s also the best for cold damage as well. Which has nothing to do with my liking it, of course not!
Also, random other note, PF2e just has more spells, like, in general, than D&D 5e. Which might be why some of them, as I noted previously, are a lot more specific and specialised.
I do find spreadsheets soothing, you know? Apologies to all. I’m very frazzled the past couple months.
Today we’ve got a New Game menu, with all the relevant options for the primary game mode in and functional, as well as a little flair for the player in the form of a little icon that displays their current damage type.
Both of these are technically in-progress. The New Game menu has a section for a planned “Infinite” game mode, which will be a kind of rogue-lite, make-it-as-far-as-you-can thing. And the flair will eventually include all the visual parts of the player. The wings, cone (front), and engine (back) will change depending on the abilities the player has equipped.
Which means lots more art tomorrow. Which isn’t a bad thing. After all...
By which I mean, more fun for me with spreadsheets and D&D. In that I have yet again decided to randomly analyse some random piece of the game for funsies. In this case, damage types across spells/spell levels. I made a spread sheet with all the damage types that can be dealt by a spell, and spell levels from cantrip to 9th level, and then started filling in spells that did that damage type at that level.
I clarified that I was only including spells that inflicted said damage on an enemy, not the caster due to a mishap (eg Etherealness dealing force damage if you rematerialize inside an object), and spells that did that damage type themselves without requiring an extra external source of the type (eg Web doing fire damage if you set them on fire). I did leave in spells that added extra damage of that type to weapon attacks (eg various Smite spells). I didn’t put in Alter Self giving you natural weapons, despite putting Animate Objects later, so possibly you can argue with me on that.
But! Once I had that done, I then looked at how the damage types were spread across spell levels, and then further what damage types had dedicated, unique spells that only dealt that type of damage at each level. Then afterwards I added a total number of spells that do each damage type, along with the number that do only that damage type. So if you were a spellcaster and wanted to specialise in a damage type, how easy would it be to find a unique spell for your type at each level?
(Granted, I am not taking class lists into account for this, this is just a theoretical spellcaster who could access anything they wanted. Mostly I wanted to see which damage types even had it as a possibility)
(I’m also not taking into account if the spells are actually good, just whether or not they do a particular damage type)
So. Some results:
The damage types that are represented at every spell level in some capacity are cold, fire, force, necrotic and, surprisingly, bludgeoning. Of these, force and necrotic have unique, single damage type spells at all levels. Fire, bludgeoning and radiant have the next best results for unique spells across levels, only missing a spell level each, followed by psychic in a trailing 6th place.
The worst represented damage type across spell levels is slashing damage, which seems to be almost purely a weapon damage type. Both poison and thunder are also poorly represented, with piercing doing better than them, if only by a level. In terms of unique spells of a damage type across levels, after slashing, poison is the worst, followed by acid, lightning and thunder damage.
In terms of total numbers of spells, it shifts slightly, with fire coming in the clear winner, followed by cold, then bludgeoning and force, then psychic and radiant. Lightning actually makes a relatively decent showing in terms of number of spells that have it as an option. Slashing is again the clear worst, followed by poison. Thunder does do better than piercing by raw numbers of spells, though.
In terms of spells that only do that damage type, fire is still far and away the winner, followed by force, then necrotic and psychic, then bludgeoning and radiant. So those are the ‘thematic’ damage types, where the damage type is likely to hold its own as a single-type spell.
Interestingly, the damage type where the two numbers closest match, total spells and total type-only spells, is psychic. In other words, if a spell deals psychic damage, it’s likely to only deal psychic damage. So psychic spells are likely the most thematic? Slashing is next closest, so if you have a slashing spell at all, you have a slashing spell. Same for force and piercing, necrotic, poison and radiant damage. So exotic and physical damage spells tend to be purer in intent, while the ‘elemental’ types of damage are more likely to be part of mixed damage spells.
The damage type with the biggest difference between total spells and total single-damage spells is, surprisingly, cold damage. There’s actually not many purely cold-dealing spells. This one didn’t surprise me, though, I’ve gotten that feeling before. It’s hard to specialise purely in cold magic without mixing other things in.
So. If you wanted to pick a damage type as a theme. Fire gives the most choice of individual spells, spread across most spell levels. Force and necrotic give you options across all spell levels, as well as a good selection of individual spells as well. Bludgeoning is surprisingly good (though mostly if you’re a druid, admittedly), which possibly says something about how spellcasters do, at the end of the day, also just want to thump people a lot. Psychic is extremely individual and thematic, though you’ll be missing a couple of spell levels.
Thunder, poison, acid and lightning all need a bit of help, although lightning isn’t doing too badly in total spells, they’re just not well arranged across spell levels, and they’re usually mixed-damage where lightning is just an option. Cold could also probably use some help in terms of specialist spells.
And there is, apparently, a surprising dearth of spells that let you cut a bitch. You can stab them, or beat them to death, but not cut them, at least not with magic. Gonna have to get an actual physical weapon if you want to do slashing damage to people.
Anyway. Thus endeth another interlude in spreadsheet land. Heh.
Slashing: Treats all armor as having the “HA” tag. Anytime this weapon causes an injury (see page x) that target is infected with the bleeding effect (see page x). Ex. swords and bladed polearms.
Ballistic: Weapons uses the Gun AD. One handed weapons of this type may be wielded 2 handed for +2 accuracy. The weapon, unless otherwise stated, incurs a stealth penalty equal to half its damage when fired until you move to at least medium range from were you fired. Ex. Guns
Stella: Halves armor value. Ex. Magic
Energy: Deal Additional Shock Damage equal to damage done (ignoring armor). Energy Resistance reduces shock damage from this type as well as normal damage. Ex. Fire, Plasma, Beam, Microwave, Radiation.
Chemical: Ignores Armor, Chemical Resistance still applied. Ex. Poison, Toxin, Agitates
do primary weapons even get a damage type? I keep looking for primaries with like arc or void damage but I havnt found any, all my specials and heavies have damage typings but I cant find a single primary
