My Ranger jumped enthusiastically in a pool of slime or acid (in my defense: it looked like a pile of gold) and all my items ended up taking 28 points of damage. I want to figure out what can still be salvaged.
I'm aware of the Mending and Make Whole spells, but it's not entirely clear to me what can repaired and how. Here's how I understand it:
* All mundane items are destroyed, except for my Masterwork Breastplate, which is broken.
* Mundane items that are destroyed cannot be repaired, so they are permanently lost.
* Most magic items are destroyed, except armor and +2 and +3 weapons because they get +10 HP per +1 (I have two greataxes +1 bane, one of them large, so unusable to me).
* The physical aspect of most destroyed magic items can be repaired, but restoring the magical abilities has additional requirements as mentioned in Make Whole.
* Magic items that are only broken (I think that's only my collection of +3 weapons) retain their magical properties.
* Potions and wands are lost.
Is this correct?
Is there a way to restore the magical function of magic items where the caster doesn't meet the requirements for Make Whole? Or should we wait until we do meet those requirements?
Are there any other items that could have survived 28 points of damage, other than armor and magic weapons?
Looks to me like you have a firm grasp on things.
greater make whole only requires a caster level = to that of the item.
You can also repair magic items with the appropriate craft feat at half the cost and time.
I'm assuming the 28 damage is after hardness and half damage for being energy damage has been taken into account?
you could appeal that attended magic items aren't required to save against damaging effects but as you indicate you leapt in I doubt it would get you very far, it's not an unreasonable GM call to damage everything.
The 28 points of damage is prescribed by the encounter (from an Adventure Path). Hardness and energy damage had no effect as far as I know. It's that high because it took 4 or 5 rounds before I realized what I'd jumped into. (I kept failing my will checks for the illusion.) And again, the damage to all items was apparently part of the encounter.
Greater Make Whole is not going to be any use to me because it's from a book we don't use, unfortunately.
Repairing magic items with craft feats could be an option, except we opted out of those because we can't buy the required ingredients; the only settlement only reliably has items of 400 gp or less at the moment. So we've got to make do with the items we find. It's a shame that some of our best items now got broken or destroyed.
Although a broken greataxe is apparently still usable. Rules suggest its magic might not work properly, but offers no explanation in what way it might fail. If it's only broken, it is still magical as far as I can tell, and Mending or Make Whole will bring it back to working order with no problem.
Mending has a limit of 1 lb per level, so being level 5, items of 5 lbs or less can be Mended. Everything else requires Make Whole, which is a lot slower, being a level 2 spell.
My suggestion to use Mending to restore the hitpoints of all destroyed smaller (including magical) items and only use Make Whole once to restore the magic, was considered a loophole, which I understand, because Mending has unlimited uses. But requiring Make Whole for the whole thing would make Mending a counter to Make Whole, which would be odd. Perhaps a limit of 1 Mending per item per day (as I read elsewhere on this forum) would be a fair compromise.
Still, repairing most magic items will have to wait until we level up. A simple Ring of Protection has CL5, so we have to wait until level 10 before it can be repaired, and so is my Sleep Arrow. +1 weapons are CL 3, so we can repair them when we're level 6. A Ring of Feather falling is CL 1, so it can be repaired right now (as soon as we take the time for it). My Muleback Cords are CL 3, so can be repaired fairly soon. Both of my +3 items are only broken, so they can be repaired with Make Whole with no problems. Only the Ring of Protection +1 and the Sleep Arrow are going to be useless for the foreseeable future. And I don't care much about that arrow (who would have thought a 132 gp item would be my most powerful magic item?).
All in all, the damage, while tremendous, does not seem to be crippling. I was lucky that we've found several masterwork mighty Str 18 composite longbows, and someone else was carrying one of them, and another PC had a spare set of arrows, so I can still shoot. My Breastplate can be Made Whole, and someone had an Armored Coat as backup so I got some armor in the mean time. It's mostly the loss of my mundane gear (rope, alchemist's fire) and the potions that turned me from overprepared into underprepared.
All in all it was a good lesson.
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Note that the hardness and half damage from energy to items is in the Core Rulebook, and that, in that case, for many items, if that 28 points is the total damage from 4 or 5 rounds, it only comes to about 5-7 points per round, and each round's damage should be applied against hardness individually, not all at once.
Won't help much for many mundane items, but even mundane weapons can have enough hardness that that might not even harm them. Most metal blades, for instance, start at 10 hardness, even before magical bonuses come into play.
I understand, but according to the GM, this encounter ignored hardness. Though it'd certainly be odd if Paizo's own encounter ignored their own rules.
The damage was done by Green Slime, which apparently ignores the hardness of metal (but not of wood and stone, which is of little use to me).
You took 4 or 5d6 Con damage and survived? Well done!
The damage to items from green slime is untyped, and ignores hardness of metal, but not wood, and doesn't affect stone at all, so no halving for energy damage, unfortunately for you.
A single 5-foot square of green slime deals 1d6 points of Constitution damage per round while it devours flesh. On the first round of contact, the slime can be scraped off a creature (destroying the scraping device), but after that it must be frozen, burned, or cut away (dealing damage to the victim as well). Anything that deals cold or fire damage, sunlight, or a remove disease spell destroys a patch of green slime. Against wood or metal, green slime deals 2d6 points of damage per round, ignoring metal's hardness but not that of wood. It does not harm stone.
You should talk to your gm about any wooden items as green slime ignores hardness of metal items but not of wood. Since you seem to be a switch hitter who lost their bow this could be relevant. Yeah I'm also curious how did you survive the con damage? just dumb luck? 5d6 con no save would almost certainly kill most of my characters (well high chances I tend to have 14 con)...
edit I just read your last post, and you already knew that... never mind...
I think I lucked out on the Con damage. I have Con 14, but my notes look like I only had 8 points of Con damage. Or maybe I only wrote it down after the first Lesser Restoration.
We did recalculate the damage based on wood and hardness. A Sleep Arrow (wooden, the GM ruled) also survived, and after a single Mending it's not even broken anymore.
I did lose two Masterwork Mighty +4 composite longbows. Fortunately earlier we'd encountered two enemies that used exactly the same type of bow I used, so a party member carried one spare, and I now still have a bow.
It was a combination of extreme bad luck (or perhaps an extremely bad decision) and some extremely good luck.