Does the cleric spell list suck?

[DM Beckett]

Back when PF Core was still coming out, there was a massive push to try to have Spontaneous Cure/Inflict replaced with Spontaneous Domains, which would have had a very similar effect. But they chose to basically revert back to the 3E Cleric, with a crapload of spell nerfs instead.

The Alpha/Beta versions of PF had the Cleric getting Domain spells as spell-like abilities, and it was pretty amazing.

[anlashok]

Suck? No. The Cleric is still a definitive T1 monster and the Oracle isn't that much behind. Both classes are amazing and have quite a few awesome spells.

What you can complain about is that a lot of their spells are pretty bland and that while there's enough good options for a cleric to take, there aren't enough good options for two or three clerics to take.

That is to say, if I'm a wizard I can take XYZ if I'm looking to do battlefield control but if I'm looking to blast I might only take X and take AB instead and a buffer might take CDE instead of any of those.

For a cleric, there's far fewer extremely good options, so chances are even something as wildly different in goals as a control cleric, blaster cleric, and melee cleric are only going to have a couple different spells in their arsenal.

I've run into that problem a lot with my oracles too. Barring Mystery and Curse stuff, my melee oracle even by level 15 or 16 is only going to have four or five spells that my caster oracle doesn't and vice versa.

Granted, every class has that issue where there are must have spells and "Who thought this was a good idea?" Spells, it just feels more pronounced with the cleric list.

[Dark Immortal]

@anlashok, I think you are suffering from a case of repetitive habit or what I prefer to call 'theoretical optimization habit'. It's where some options tend to be universally useful to the point that the idea of always taking it is assumed. Then, when it is time to actually make a character, apply flavor and season so it is memorable, you have very little room.

The cleric list is seemingly bland. However, you can ignore every single spell that is popular and considered good and create radically different and highly effective spell lists across a variety of build concepts with little in the way of overlap between spells. This is before looking at domains and gear. If people took the time to a.) Build legitimately and realistically (not like many optimizers build- and I am not saying that you are or aren't) and b.) look at the options actually presented, they would find that there are quite a great many choices.

My cleric necromancer will likely never cast any spells that my oracle will ever know except for one, shield of faith (and either character may drop that spell).

My 'holy commander' character pretty much just needs first and second level spells to do his job, using higher level spell slots for more uses of his lower level spells. He doesn't take any of the spells that my oracle or necromancer will ever know/prepare.

That's three different divine casters with 0 (or virtually 0) spell overlap. All of them are highly effective at what they do. Off the top of my head, I could make another two characters who use no overlapping spells and are clerics. So five different characters without a single spell overlapping among them, all capable of functioning well within expected parameters for adventuring. Once you add domains, mysteries, etc, you begin to see a lot more potential variety. If people choose not to actually use that variety due to previously held notions then yeah, you'll see a lot of the same boring crap from every divine caster as they are all sticking to the same fraction of a fraction of the list of spells available to them and pretending as though the rest are either purely circumstantial and restricted to wand/scroll use or purely useless (when in fact there is an excessively long list of cleric spells just as good as the popular ones).

My biggest gripe about the cleric spell list is that I just want more spells. More spells means it will be easier to distinguish from other divine casters as you can have less overlap. Arcane casters have an easier time of this because they have so freaking many spells, including most of the ones a cleric has (another thing that annoys me).