What are some ways of bypassing hardness with melee weapons besides using adamantine? I need a way of quickly/conveniently destroying structure/matter of all kinds...with a weapon.
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What are some ways of bypassing hardness with melee weapons besides using adamantine? I need a way of quickly/conveniently destroying structure/matter of all kinds...with a weapon.
Energy damage.
The weapon normal damage would be affected by the hardness, but fire/cold/electric/sonic/force damage would not.
For one-offs, you might also want to consider Weapon Blanching, Adamantine, which is cheaper than an actual Adamantine weapon, but only gives one attack as Adamantine.
What are some ways of bypassing hardness with melee weapons besides using adamantine? I need a way of quickly/conveniently destroying structure/matter of all kinds...with a weapon.Energy damage.
The weapon normal damage would be affected by the hardness, but fire/cold/electric/sonic/force damage would not.
No, the hardness would apply and most likely negate all the energy damage.
Energy Attacks: Energy attacks deal half damage to most objects. Divide the damage by 2 before applying the object's hardness. Some energy types might be particularly effective against certain objects, subject to GM discretion. For example, fire might do full damage against parchment, cloth, and other objects that burn easily. Sonic might do full damage against glass and crystal objects.
Siege weapons, plow straight through hardness, through raw damage.
Power attack is your friend. If you have time and spell support, you can couple it with Vital Strike, Enlarge, Bull's Str, Lead Blades, Bard Song, Heroism, Prayer etc for more damage.
One change in PF is that Walls of Force can now be damaged by weapons, but have DR 30. You'd have to stack up some spells to be able to bypass it.
Maul of the titans
Does triple damage against inanimate objects.
DC 20 knowledge engineering check to find weak spots in buildings.
What game are you playing Iron? Is this one of those 3PP things? I'd recommend staying within the standard stuff personally.
Consider using a subset of previous rules to overcoming hardness whereby you could use the harness of your own tools to overcome the hardness of an object.
I think the rule of thumb was that if the hardness of your tool was at least double the hardness of the object full damage was dealt. If your tool had less than this value the difference between that value and your weapons actual hardness was dealt to your weapon (and subtracted from the damage dealt to the object), up to the amount of damage actually dealt.
Therefore, taking a stone wall with hardness 8, you would need a weapon with hardness 16 to deal full damage to it. For every point of hardness your weapon had less than 16 your weapon took a point of damage from the attack, which would be subtracted from the amount of damage dealt to the object.
This could be further modified by the appropriateness of the weapon to damage the object, but only for purposes of improving this value. Ergo a pick would get a bonus to bypass the wall's hardness, but a hammer might not, though it wouldn't take any extra damage from the attempt.
Now, remembering that every +1 enhancement increases the hardness of that object by 2, a mithral weapon (base hardness of 15) could easily meet this requirement for most objects with just a +1 enhancement.
Hope that helps.
Thanks, this is all good stuff to ponder. And yes, certainly planned on taking engineering. :)
Barbarians have a rage power that bypasses all hardness.
Ehem... Maul of titans
3d10+9 + users str bonusx3 +other bonusesx3. to inanimate objects
That's 25.5 average damage against stuff before user factors are considered.
That's 4.5 points more average damage than a standard catapult. If you have a str bonus of +1 you do more than a heavy catapult....
How much damage to stuff did you need to do?
Edit: you do need minimum str 18 or else you get negatives.
you do need minimum str 18 or else you get negatives.
And just over 25k gold. Might as well take the adamantine weapon for 3k at lower levels. You could always trade up though. It is a pretty sweet weapon if you can afford it and have the strength to wield it effectively.
How much damage to stuff did you need to do?
I was thinking it would be fun to have the ability to turn a bland room into a battlefield of my own design with pits/higher ground, difficult terrain (dense rubble from digging/destroying), partial/total cover, squeezing obstacles, other primitive fortifications (bottlenecks, etc) without magic relatively quickly (like a matter of hours or less). I want to be doing it at level 1. I'm not so interested in crafting traps, more just battlefield advantages I can get creative with in combat.
Mattock of titans also decent... 4d6 +3 ignores hardness less than 20,also smashes ten foot cube of rock an hour and can be used to loosen and tumble earthen ramparts at the rate of 10 feet per 10 minutes.
Unfortunately you have to figure out how to get huge to use it.
At level 1...there's about...0 things you can do, I think. Maybe that adamantine arrow idea.
Well, I don't know about 1st lvl unless the structures you are working with are primarily wood or brick style stonework, but I think that Profession (Engineer) or Knowledge (Engineering) should definitely be a part of this concept.
The cheapest single item you could get to do most of this would likely be an adamantine weapon at 3k (first affordable at lvl 4-5 by WBL). Otherwise you will either have to lug around a ton of material-specific tools (picks, saws, axes, etc.) or improvise them to do a lot of what you want.
On the other hand you could ask your DM if you could create a special tool for the character that had most of the requirements. I could see a double weapon type thing that had a pick/hammer head on one end and a funny chopping blade/saw on the other. Definitely a gnomish contraption. ("Why carry 10 tools when my saw-bladed pick-hammer can perform the job of all of them?")
Where can I find rules about using specialized tools like pickaxes and wood axes?
Buy cows and lead them onto the battlefield...although you can get five sheep for the price of one cow and a bunch of 2gp sheep bleating and running around a battle field some flaming some not, some tied together some not... That would definitely change the course of a battle and is within a first level budget...
In the APG the fighter (weapon master) endline let's you bypass DR entirely.
Maybe throw up some makeshift freestanding tower shields - set them up like picture frames. Instant battlements.
