Quote Originally Posted by Estrillian View Post
My opinion on that is that they forgot that there were non-combat spells. Seriously practically every spell is basically about combat, just like almost every class feature. Sure there are spells that you can use out of combat but they were all clearly designed with a "combat is where the mechanics bite" sort of mindset.

It is a weird holdover from 4E, I think, which is quite dissonant with what they say in the PHB intro about the pillars of adventuring. They set up this idea that Investigation, Social Interaction and Combat are equally important, and then don't bother with Social or Investigative spells at all (except for a handful of Detect spells and charm) ... in just the same way that class abilities that don't apply to combat are few and far between (or just treated as ribbons).

The lack of rituals is a good pointer to this. If rituals are the non-combat spell superstars then you might expect 2/3 of spells to be rituals. Certainly you'd expect 2/3 of spells to be non-combat, but it is nothing like that, and even more so when you look at the spells added in Princes of the Apocalypse (for example). There are only so many spells that do XdX damage that we need.
I really would imagine that there would be more non-combat spells than combat spells, simply due to the fact that most magic users would come up with spells to make their daily life easier. And I doubt that most magic users have a daily life involving combat.

If I get time tonight, I'm going to go through some spell lists and see what the ratios are.