| 3 people marked this as FAQ candidate. |
I'm aware that you need a weapon enhancement equal to the same enhancement bonus or higher of the weapon you want to sunder.
Does this also apply to armor and shields? I hope so, because I have a PC that loves to take down an opponent's shield and armor with ease and I hope the enhancement bonus rule also applies to those magic items as well?
Shields ARE weapons, so it applies to those as well.
Not sure about armor though.
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Shields ARE weapons, so it applies to those as well.
Not usually in terms of magical enhancement bonuses they're not - which is the bit being questioned here. Or, to put it another way, you only count any magical enhancement bonuses used specifically to enchant the shield as a weapon, not the normal bonuses used to enchant it as a shield, when looking at its potential 'sunder immunity'.
Otherwise, there's nothing in the rules to indicate that anything except magic weapons normally gets 'sunder immunity' from its base enchantments.
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Shields ARE weapons, so it applies to those as well.Not usually in terms of magical enhancement bonuses they're not - which is the bit being questioned here. Or, to put it another way, you only count any magical enhancement bonuses used specifically to enchant the shield as a weapon, not the normal bonuses used to enchant it as a shield, when looking at its potential 'sunder immunity'.
Otherwise, there's nothing in the rules to indicate that anything except magic weapons normally gets 'sunder immunity' from its base enchantments.
So you would need to have the Shield Master feat to protect your shield from sundering? This Sounds very strange to me...
Shield Master:
Benefit: You do not suffer any penalties on attack rolls made
with a shield while you are wielding another weapon. Add your
shield’s enhancement bonus to attacks and damage rolls made
with the shield as if it was a weapon enhancement bonus.
Prerequisites: Improved Shield Bash, Shield
Proficiency, Shield Slam, Two-Weapon Fighting, base
attack bonus +11.
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Looks like a great FAQ candidate. My take is that it applies to armor as well, with the idea being the power of the magic needs to be strong enough to break through the object being sundered. It would then make me wonder how artifact items are effected in these. Would an artifact need to be sundered by an artifact weapon?
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So you would need to have the Shield Master feat to protect your shield from sundering? This Sounds very strange to me...
Well, the Feat just lets you add the bonuses 'as if they were...' rather than mystically granting the actual bonuses to the shield in question...
... But I'd never claim the whole issue isn't 'strange'... ;)
Why only weapons? Well... there seems to be no real reason - although I'd guess it may be a legacy issue from the days where you could try to break someone's sword, but generic breaking stuff rules were a little way off... if such days ever existed. Either that or it's weirdly related to the creatures with DR being able to hurt each other rules...
... But yeah... strange...
As far as the RAW, the enhancement bonus on armor/shields does not matter for sundering purposes (except the increase to hardness and HP).
I play a sundering Breaker Barbarian 2/Two-Handed Fighter 6 in PFS. I've found that sundering armor is not usually the best course of action anyway.
The reason is that weapons tend to be a much bigger threat to the party. Most enemies who wear significant armor are also doing their damage by swinging stuff. If you break the weapons, they're essentially at your mercy, while you've still got a lot of HP to go through to disable the enemy if you destroy their armor instead - also, heavier armors tend to take two sunders to destroy, while a weapon can usually be broken in one go (at my level, anyway).
Divine casters are about the only people whose armor I would target first, and only if I had a at least two 3/4 BAB physical attackers on my team who would actually benefit from the lowered AC over the next round, as my own attack rolls tend to be high enough to hit most things at my level pretty reliably without breaking their armor first.