Things you always wondered about --

[Aunt Tony]

-- But were too lazy to calculate for yourself.

So yeah, the Staff of Life as written. The Magic Item Creation Rules for Staffs (you may need to scroll down or follow the intra-page link to get to the appropriate section).

Quote:

Heal, CL 11, 1 charge per use = 400 * 11 * 6 = 26,400g

Raise Dead, CL 11, 5 charges/use = ((300 * 11 * 5 ) + (5k * 50))/ 5 = 53,300g

Total cost to craft: 79,700gold - 50,000g (materials) = 29,700g for the spells alone
Price then (cost * 2) = 59,400g (spells alone) + 50,000g (materials for Raise) = 109,400g (which is shown)

The thing to note is that the material component cost of Raise Dead is not multiplied by 2 when determining the market Price of the final item, but it is still a huge factor in the Cost (if you were to craft this staff yourself, the material component expense alone is ~63% of the item's cost!!).

So the material component of of the Raise Dead power is 50,000g all by itself. Remember that this is 20% of the material component's cost if you were to cast the spell 50 times because the staff uses 5 charges per use... So potentially this could be a dramatic money saver if you would be using the Raise Dead power of the staff more than roughly 10 times, right? There's some error in this general rule of thumb depending on whether you would otherwise be Raising Dead by casting the spell yourself or using a Scroll (and therefore paying the Scribing cost of the Scrolls on top of all this...).

Now let's consider the Heal portion:

Quote:

50 scrolls of Heal have a Price of 1650 * 50 = 82,500g

or if you Scribed these Scrolls yourself, you'd be out only 1650/2 * 50 = 41,250g

So as you can see, relative to Scrolls, the Staff is already efficient at only 32 castings of Heal at CL 11, right?

arithmetic:

26400/41250 = .62 * 50 = 32

So let's see here, if you were to craft a Staff with just Heal in it alone, you could recover

more arithmetic:

10 * 110 = 1,100 HP without even needing to recharge, or if you spaced out your efforts, you could recover 32 * 110 = 3520 hp before the Staff becomes gold efficient compared to Scrolls

.

Even more amazing, the UMD for staffs is a static 20, right? Compared to Scrolls which would be DC 26 or 25 which means that you could no-fail the Staff Of Life around character level 8 without much effort at all.

Speaking of Wands, let's compare.

Quote:

CLW = 750 Cost (1500 Price) and 5.5 * 50 = 275 hp which comes to a ratio of .37hp/g if you craft it (.18 if you just buy the wand)

The ratio of the Staff of Life's Heal component is potentially infinite because the Staff can be recharged. So let's compare at various charges: 10, 32 and 50:
1100 / 26400 = .04 hp/g
3520 / 26400 = .13 hp/g
5500 / 26400 = .21 hp/g (which is in fact quite good)

But it does take another 30 or 40 uses before the Staff becomes more gold efficient than the CLW Wand... Consider though, how many Wands would you have to eat before you could recover, say, 1,100hp? -- and how many rounds would it take to expend all those charges? It's actually more about speed. 200 rounds versus 10. And of coure the status effects which Heal can remove. Unfortunately, calculating the value of the status effects would be a nightmare and simply misleading anyway because it's far more random how many or which statuses will be removed.

You should probably assume that there will be far less healing "wasted" using the CLW Wands because the granularity of the healing chunks.

More nuggets of mathemagical shennanigans that may not be immediately obvious from anyone? Consider the thread to be a bit of a repository for random mathcrafting and sister thread to the other ones for "tips and tricks from old timers".