I’m dropping this here because I accidentally put it in General when it should have been here. Sorry if it doesn’t look great. I’m totally blind and I’m not great at formatting things.
Pathfinder 2e has four spell traditions (spell lists,) and they are as follows: Arcane, Divine, Occult, and Primal. Each class draws from one of these traditions, though some of them have options that allow them to choose a tradition at first level. Because of this, it makes absolutely no sense to sort spells by class as it is currently done in the compendium. It is very confusing and not how the system works at all. The only spells that are largely class-specific are focus spells.
Please drop likes and comments here to encourage this change to be implemented. I honestly think it’s essential for new players learning the game as it will be confusing if they’re told to check the Divine spell list and that doesn’t exist in the compendium. The way it is now is not in line with the rules of the game at all, and it seems like it would not only make things more complicated for players, but for devs as well, seeing as every spell in the game that isn’t a focus spell says what tradition it belongs to. As the official digital toolset for Pathfinder, it is my opinion that the compendium should follow the source material as much as possible, and this current method of spell sorting very much does not.
Thanks for sharing your feedback. We are very aware of how spells are organized in Pathfinder 2E regarding traditions, and we deliberated before launching the Spells Listing into Early Access as to what the best top-level filter would be for spells.
I’ll respectfully disagree on the take that the toolset is “not in line with the rules of the game at all.” Having the Class filters is not against how the system works - it is simply a different way to organize the information. We ended up going with “by Class” to start because we received feedback from Pathfinder players in our concept phase saying that is also useful, as their framing question was “As this class, which spells do I have access to?” So for classes like the Sorcerer that can access spells from multiple traditions depending on their class features, they’ll have more spells show up than some of the other classes.
Having said that, we almost went with “by Tradition” to start, and it’s very likely that we will update the top-level filter to that before we close out Early Access.
Although, now that we’ve seen some additional content release, it’s clear we would have had to change the top-level filter from “Tradition” as well - it would instead need to be “by Spell List,” since Secrets of Magic introduced things like Elementalism.
Thanks for posting and adding your voice to the conversation to help us determine the final direction we’ll end up going with for the listing!
While I do see what you’re saying regarding something like the Elementalist, your example about the Sorcerer and not knowing which spells it has access to seems to reinforce my argument more than yours. The reason I say this is because the Sorcerer can access any of the four traditions based on bloodline, so just having a Sorcerer filter seems to just give you the same result as just showing all the spells, only without some focus spells that they can’t get. I would argue that showing that Sorcerers get access to that entire spell list is misleading and confusing, because if the player using this as a reference sees that without understanding how the Sorcerer actually works they will just have a huge list of spells that they think are for their class. I do see that you’re trying to eliminate some potential confusion, but doing it this way has a big potential to just provide the wrong information to new players because classes that can choose their tradition will just get an unorganized mess of a spell list that doesn’t correctly represent their options. Obviously this won’t be a problem in the character builder because it will likely filter the list for you, but right now if I was building a Sorcerer or Witch using this compendium for reference, choosing spells would be very arduous once I chose my bloodline or patron, because I would then have to pick the spells of the correct tradition out from the others. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a way to further filter them once I have made the choice.
I understand your point clearly. What I am saying is in our early focus-group style interactions, we asked the specific question of “Is it helpful to show all four traditions minus specific focus spells for the sorcerer to answer what spells do I have access to as the class?” and the early feedback we received was “yes.”
Yes, everything will filter to only spells you can select in the character tools (which is another reason we initially went with a different way to organize in the listing after that early feedback, to provide a variety of views knowing character tools were coming).
Additionally, there is a way on the Spells Listing to filter by Tradition (as well as level, rarity, source, and more) using the additional filters expansion at the top of the page.
Regardless, as I mentioned in the last reply, we are likely to adjust to the top-level filter being by Spell List before we get to full launch.
Thanks!