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I'm currently writing up a wizard with an item crafting focus, and I'd like to get Craft Staff at some point. He's slated to start out at level 9, and Craft Staff has a prerequisite of "Caster level 11th".
However, this wizard has a couple of means of increasing his caster level - but not for every school. Do caster level increases from the likes of Varisian Tattoo and Bloatmage Initiate count for satisfying blanket caster level prerequisites?
Taking the idea further, what about an arcanist with the Potent Magic exploit? How about someone with an orange ioun stone?
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Has to be your base CL, not for a specific school.
The only thing that might count is the ioun stone.
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There are also the Magical Knack trait and (possibly) the Crown of the Kobold King -- but not much else.
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A compromise could be: The GM allows you to take the feat, but you can only craft a staff with spells you have CL 11+ for. I don't see a real balance problem here.
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I'm presuming if you're crafting you're a single-classed spellcaster, so you need caster level boosts that are not capped at your character level. You also need a boost that applies to all your spellcasting and not just to specific spells. To my knowledge there is only one thing in the game that meets these requirements: the Orange Prism Ioun Stone. It is ridiculously expensive, and the fact that is considered a tenable item at that price is indicative of just how powerful an unconditional and uncapped +1 to caster level really is.
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The Crown of the Kobold King is cheaper, but it has two problems:
1) It only boosts caster level for the Sorcerer class, and
2) It was written by Paizo for D&D 3.5, not for Pathfinder (in case that matters).
The Crown of the Kobold King is cheaper, but it has two problems:
1) It only boosts caster level for the Sorcerer class, and
2) It was written by Paizo for D&D 3.5, not for Pathfinder (in case that matters).
Anything coming out of the appendix of an AP or module should face higher levels of scrutiny by the GM. There's a lot of questionable material in those appendices. Given the context, the titular Crown of the Kobold King is a unique reward for completing this specific adventure, and I would never make this item generally available.
I'd be hesitant to allow any way to get Craft Staff early because then the wizard could take Staff-like Wand at level 10, and that discovery is really powerful.
I'm more or less presuming that's the case. Unless you're in a campaign with month-long periods of downtime between adventuring, staffs discharge way faster than you can recharge them and just end up being very expensive clutter in your bag of holding. Without house rules, there's very little reason to use them at all and I can't see any player investing a feat to craft one. The Staff-like Wand discovery basically renders staves obsolete as an item class, since it gives Wand every relevant advantage they have. In theory staves are fully reusable, but in practice the amount of downtime required to recharge a staff is so excessive that it's more efficient to just craft a new wand every time you blow through 50 charges. Craft Staff is ironically just a prerequisite tax to the feat that makes staffs obsolete.
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In this particular case, I'm actually just looking to get a Staff of Mithral Might. :P
Reading over the referenced feats and such again, the wording "cast at +1 caster level" does seem like it sufficiently distances the ability from "having a caster level of X" for use as prerequisites.
The wizard build in question is the one detailed here (though starting at a higher level than anticipated back then), and the staff's selection of spells are ones I expect to use with some regularity.
SheepishEidolon's suggestion happens to fit the circumstances perfectly, though, so I might ask the DM for such a house rule.
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I'm actually just looking to get a Staff of Mithral Might
You need to pay a 6th level spell slots to recharge a Staff of Mithral Might, so it's useless to you before 11th level anyways. In addition the maximum rate at which staves can be recharged is 1 charge/day, and the good spells on this staff costs 3 and 4 charges respectively. You need about a week of downtime to recharge the stave every time you use it, so it's not something you can use frequently.