The Most Popular 5e Spells, Visualized

I hit a fun milestone recently: users of this site have added 100,000 spells to their spellbooks.

The number's even higher than that, but I threw away the first 50,000 or so adds because I hadn't started fingerprinting the classes of the spellbooks users are adding spells to.

Now when a spell is added to a spellbook, I check what class that player likely is based off the composition of their spellbook. I can then estimate the frequency of classes to determine how available a spell is to players, based off the spell's classes and level. You can read more about how this is done.

It's not a perfect process as there's a ton of ways players can get their hands on spells that aren't available to their class, but it still offers very useful insight. In fact the drawback of not knowing a spell's complete availability because of class features mean spells getting picked outside their class will out perform over ones that don't, and they probably should!

So how did I want to celebrate this milestone? I made some graphs!

This graph plots spells based on how many times players have added the spell to their spellbooks vs. how available the spell is to players as described above.

Spells that are added more but less available are more appealing to players than spells added less but more available.

For example, Detect Magic is the most available spell in the game: it's Level 1 and all classes have access to it which also contributes to it being one of the most chosen spells in the game with 1,603 adds. But the most added spell is Cure Wounds with 1,663 adds. Not only is it a more added spell, but it is also less available, since Sorcerers, Warlocks and Wizards don't get the spell, meaning it's far more appealing to players.

The spell that has the highest appeal to players over the first 100,000 adds is Sorcerous Burst. It has 327 adds. That's 20% of the adds that Detect Magic has, but since Sorcerous Burst is only available to Sorcerers (noting the caveat above that some class features grant access to it), it's much harder to get.

Unfortunately as you can see, this graph isn't terribly useful. The availability of spells has a huge bias on how many adds they get, so the exponentially more available lower level spells dominate most of the graph's area, leaving the majority of more advanced spells tucked away in a small area of the lower left corner.

But I decided to show this graph any way, as it reflects the raw data of the game, and just how rare and special it is when someone gets to cast Wish.

Now on to the graph I wanted to make:

This graph compares each spell's appeal vs. how available it is in the game.

Appeal is calculated by the difference between how many adds a spell has and how many adds it would be expected to have based on its availability. So by using this data instead of raw adds, we've decoupled spell adds from its relationship with spell availability to illustrate how coveted spells truly are by players.

Along with logarithmic scales, exponentially rarer higher level spells are no longer hidden in the bottom left corner, but reflected more uniformly across the graph, with each quadrant in balance and reflecting different categorizations of spells:

• The upper right corner is where the most available, most appealing spells are. These are the iconic spells of the game, highly loved and frequently seen in play.

• The upper left corner features similarly appealing spells, but they become substantially less available to characters. Either unique to a single class, and/or much higher in level where they're harder to access, these are rare and sought after.

• The lower left corner is where spells are the least picked and the least available. These are the most unknown and unseen spells in 5e.

• Finally the lower right corner features the most available spells in the game that are seldom picked. These are the spells players frequently ignore and pass over when choosing spells.

But as fun as it is to see a blob of spells and go looking for your favourites, I decided to add one more chart. A complete ranking of every spell by its appeal, by showing the number of adds an average spell would get based on its availability vs. how many adds it actually received.

There is no better measure of how users of 5e Spellbook Builder value all the spells in the game:

Thank you!

I'll always be a D&D player, but I also continue to have fun building out 5e Spellbook Builder. Analyzing spell popularity like this has been a neat and uniquely geeky D&D project to work on.

As always, I hope you enjoy, and please share it if you are!