Jacob Dill's page

claudekennilol wrote:

Not every character is going to buy straight +# items. A good number of characters may want a +1 Holy Thundering Impact weapon (or any other weapon abilities as these are just random examples).

This. While a straight +3 enhancement bonus is usually the strongest option you can buy for a +3 weapon, it's also boring. If people get special abilities instead, they will have to deal with DR.

Why do you not count the price modifiers for some of those abilities when they also count for bypassing DR/epic? The actual text is "Weapons with special abilities also count as epic for the purposes of overcoming damage reduction if the total bonus value of all of their abilities (including the enhancement bonus) is +6 or greater."

Ascalaphus & Slithery D have both made points about it existing to make minions or summons less effective. However, both will still be just has ineffective if +3 bonuses did not bypass cold iron or silver. And on that subject, not every party is going to bring minions into battle.

I was looking at the rules for damage reduction along with some of the monsters and ran into a question. For a monster above CR 10, what is the point of having DR/cold iron or silver?

A specific example of this is the Ankou from Bestiary 4. It is a CR 14 monster with DR 10/cold iron. At the point when a party would encounter this monster has a hard encounter, their average level would be 12 (APL+2 = hard). At 12th level the character is expected to have ~108,000 gp in total wealth.

A +3 weapon is stated has being able to bypass DC/cold iron or silver in the core rulebook. Based on the magic item creation rules, said weapon should cost around 20,000 depending on material since the +3 bonus is listed as 18,000 gp. At level 12, that is less that a 5th of the characters total wealth. This virtually guaranties that every character in the party will be able to completely ignore the DR of this monster.

Based on all of this, why does this monster even have DR?