I was wondering why domains offer so few spells. Let's take Water Domain Spells for example, it gives you Poison at level 3 and Ice Storm at level 5.

Why not give Obscuring Mist at level 1, Fog Cloud at level 2, and so on?

Is it a balance decision?

The problem is that Neverwinter Nights only implements a fraction of all the spells in D&D, and Obscuring Mist and Fog Cloud are two that never made the cut. In effect, this gutted most domains and forced the developers to rebalance them all with fewer domain spells.

Aww. I feared this was the case. Do you think the developers made any efforts to compensate for this?

They changed the domain spell slots into general spell slots, just as they did for specialist wizards, but that's about it.

Really, Clerics and Wizards were already comically overpowered in pen and paper so the designers didn't really need to compensate them at all. The fact that casters are still competitive in Neverwinter Nights in spite of having their spell list gutted and melee characters having been buffed through the roof is quite telling.

Oh. I must admit, I am not very knowledgeable about the balance of D&D...

Thank you for bringing me a concluding answer to my question!