Incorporeal

[Volaran]

Hey there.

This may have come up in the Alpha forums, but a quick search didn't give me anything on the boards to answer this question. This came up in game today, and likely will again, so I figured I'd double check.

Incorporeal creatures. In 3.5, attacking an incorporeal creature had a 50% miss chance unless it was a force effect or a ghost touch weapon (basically).

In the Pathfinder Beta (pg. 401), Incorporeal is listed as a condition:

"Incorporeal: Having no physical body. Incorporeal
creatures are immune to all nonmagical attack forms.
They can be harmed only by other incorporeal creatures,
+1 or better magic weapons, spells, spell-like effects, or
supernatural effects."

So, no 50% miss chance, but you need a +1 weapon, or magic to hurt an incorporeal creature. Then why does the ghost touch weapon ability still read the same as the 3.5 version, including mentioning that it is not affected by the usual 50% miss chance? Just something mistakenly left over?

I can still see the ability being present, but more to let incorporeal creatures wield such a weapon.

Thoughts?

[Thraxus]

Personally, I prefer the miss chance. Most incorporeal creatures have miserable ACs. The miss chance helps offset this. If the miss chance is done away with, the AC of most incorporeal creatures will need to improve slightly to balance out. They may also need spell resistance so that casters don't over shadow fighters.

On a related note, the old incorpreal description states the positive and negative energy effects worked like force effects, but no spells actually carried a positive energy or negative energy descriptor. Changing the way spells affect incorporeal creatures removes the problem of the GM having to guess at what constitutes a possitive or negative energy effect, but it also removes the special ability of force effects.

[The Wraith]

I noticed that the Spiritual Weapon spell still says "As a force effect, it can strike incorporeal creatures without the normal miss chance associated with incorporeality". Not sure if it is a leftover, since Bless Weapon says "The weapon is treated as having a +1 enhancement bonus for the purpose of bypassing the damage reduction of evil creatures or striking evil incorporeal creatures (though the spell doesn’t grant an actual enhancement bonus)", not mentioning any miss chance...