I vaguely remember Paizo staff saying at one of the various remaster reveals that they were doing away with Barbarian Anathemas. Perhaps it wasn't as strong a statement as that, but what actually was put into PC2 is confusing and inconsistent design. My suggestion would be they revise out the animal and elemental anathemas that still linger post remaster.
Anathemas Removed:
- Dragon
- Giant
- Spirit
Anathemas Remaining:
- Animal: is very confusing. Pre-remaster you couldn't 'disrespect your animal' by harming something of that type (that makes sense flavour wise). Then tacked on the end is "oh and you can't use a weapon" with literally no basis. In Remaster they had the 'don't beat up your animal friends' removed but somehow they held onto the 'you can't use a weapon' restriction that makes no mechanical or flavour sense? I don't see why they would even want to use a weapon except as a back-up option for ranged anyways since the unarmed options are generally equivalent to or better than weapons and handwraps won't map runes to weapons. So why did we that need a hard coded rule to stop it? Seems like someone didn't get the design memo. Even the Barbarian+ team (pre-remaster) noticed the glaring gap and added a feat at L4 for that instinct to give them a ranged unarmed strike (I think it even let you use your rage with it as well without raging thrower). I'd suggest this gets dropped in the eventual errata for PC2 since it is vestigial baggage.
- Elemental: published with Rage of Elements seemed to also miss the memo by publishing a rage instinct with an anathema when they intended to remove that entry. This is the only instinct that actually has to 'respect' the things they mimic their rage after anymore.
- Superstition: weirdest treatment of them all. It took the entire anathema wording from pre-remaster and built it into the instinct ability as a basis for then giving it an anathema. Don't get me wrong the anathema now is actually functional for a PC, but its very inconsistent design. At least this anathema makes a sense from a flavour perspective given that its all written up as you being mistrustful of magic and hateful towards casters.
