Is this for a Jax character or something?
I suppose it's as legitimate as making any other purely-metal weapon out of wood. ^_^
IMAGINE IF I HAD A REAL WEAPON.
Hardness would not stop fire damage. So just enchanting wood wouldn't help. Why not just cast continual flame?
This, because fire burns wood, as stated by the rules, this would probably ignore hardness and do full damage.
Energy Attacks
Energy attacks deal half damage to most objects. Divide the damage by 2 before applying the object’s hardness. Some energy types might be particularly effective against certain objects, subject to GM discretion. For example, fire might do full damage against parchment, cloth, and other objects that burn easily. Sonic might do full damage against glass and crystal objects.
The root problem is that the lantern staff is one of the most ill-considered weapons the adventurer's armory has given us. A staff with thin reservoirs of lamp oil along its length? And you're supposed to hit enemies with this? What happens when those reservoirs crumple, drenching you in lamp oil which is then ignited by the burning wick?
I mean, I get it that the writers liked the mechanics of fighting with a torch, treating it as a light lub that could do 1 point of fire damage. Using a torch as a weapon is a trope that has been around since the inception of D&D. This item seems intended simply to operate on a bigger scale, with a bigger stick. But the way its construction and operating procedure are described makes it wound like a terribly fragile object to be bashing folks over the head with. And yet, there is no mechanism described for b@+$*@$sing it up.
And now you want it made entirely out of wood? Is that reservoirs and all? How is this not a recipe for disaster?
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Because plenty of wood isn't flammable? And most can be treated as to not be?
And are you seriously complaining about the realism of a weapon in a game where a monk can leap 60 feet through the air horizontally and kick you using an ability that isn't even magic? Oh, and they can do this around corners too.
If hardness applied to fire for wood, then a fire log (hardness 5 with 60 or 120 hp depending on which way you look at the log as the thickness) would on average never burn out. Whereas a quick google search shows that some woods (that I would never make a quarterstaff out of mind you) like pine and fir (softwoods) burn in about 4 minutes. For that firelog, that'd burn on average (assuming 1d6 fire dmg) of ~17-34 rounds. Which comes to almost 1-1/2 to 3-1/2 minutes. A little short of 4 minutes on the longer side, but it'd burn. Now on a hardwood (such as oak or apple) can burn for longer (not quite as long as those duraflame logs of 3 hours). As to how to get them up there? Well if we we do apply hardness to them (but allowed them to do full damage or otherwise they'd never even have a chance to burn), we'll need to make a few assumptions. For one, we'll assume that every 6 rolls you get a 6 at least once. This would get you a log that'd burn for something like 30 minutes to about 1-1/6th hours. Assuming perfect probability (and that I can do math). I don't know how accurate that is for harder woods as I couldn't find average burn times for those logs, just that those Duraflame logs burned longer. First world problems, right?
Now, that seems reasonable for that, and a staff would likely be a hardwood (unless your GM says that quarterstaff you picked up in the forest was a soft pine/fir. It was free after all, right?). So I do backtrack my previous answer to replace with this. Enchanting a hardwood quarterstaff would make it have 7 hardness. Assuming a 1d6 fire damage ability, this would mean the staff would stay relatively safe and not have a problem. Just if it was made of softwood, fire will eat it up faster than butter on a sunny day, so note to self, never make a softwood torch...