The Rod of nettles is a mace that deals no damage on a hit but deals ability damage on a melee touch attack.
If I remember right making a touch attack is a standard action and you can not use the full attack action to do several touch attacks.
So my question is: If you full attack with such a rod do you apply ability damage on each hit? And is this full attack vs touch AC?
Or would you only be able to attack once using a touch attack if you want to deal the ability damage?
And if a magus would use a rod of nettles for a spellstrike targeting normal AC, would he deliver his spell and the ability damage from the rod?
touch attacks don't hve to be standard. its just that a lot of attacks that are also touch attacks use standard action.
as the rod is a melee weapon that deal no damage but only need to touch the enemy you just use it like a normal attacks as full round or stnadard) and aim for touch ac. (like if you cast chill touch and then full attack)
a magus using it for spellstrike would do the weapon damage (which is the dex) and the spell. since the attack only need to touch they both would use touch attack (infact the magus need to hit normal ac with spellstirke is from the weapon delivering the attack. normaly the spell would be touch anyway)
Well, that's broken as all heck.
Well, that's broken as all heck.
Is it really, though?
By the time you can afford it, an appropriate CR encounter should reliably make the DC 14 save. At level 11, when that rod is one fourth of your wealth, the average CR 11 creature only fails on a natural one.
So if we assume that the opponent always makes the save, we get an average dexterity dmg of 0.67 per hit.
Which is less than the Pressure Points ninja trick.
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Well, that's broken as all heck.
Is it really, though?
By the time you can afford it, an appropriate CR encounter should reliably make the DC 14 save. At level 11, when that rod is one fourth of your wealth, the average CR 11 creature only fails on a natural one.
So if we assume that the opponent always makes the save, we get an average dexterity dmg of 0.67 per hit.
I looked at this several years ago for a TWF build and came to the same conclusion. It might be a fun thing to do, but the ability damage doesn’t come fast enough to be nearly as effective as plain old HP damage. Not to mention running into things immune to ability damage.
There's something funny as heck about the idea of flying up to a great red wyrm (Dex 6) and slapping it out of the sky via TWF-ing two of these. Sure, there are plenty of counters, but I just can't get the picture out of my head. X D