Magic armor and Weapons, Caster level, and special abilities

[Yogibear41]

According to the DMG in order to put an enhancement bonus on a piece of armor or a weapon you have to have a caster level of 3x the enhancement you plan to put on it, so 3rd level for +1 6th level for +2 etc.

I had always assumed this same trend carried over to the special abilities with "enh" bonus equivalents, For example to create a +1 armor with light fortification (+1) equivalent one had to be 6th level. However I was reading a thread recently that lead me to believe this was not the case.

It lead me to believe that you only needed the caster level for the actually +1,+2 etc. and could just freely put any of the "bonus equivalent" special abilities on an item regardless of what level you actually are. (as long as you had the money to pay for it and other prerequisite spells of course, up to a max of an effective +10)

Could anyone out there help clear this up for me? :smallsmile:

[tyckspoon]

You have to have the requisite spells in some way. For normal casting, this means the special abilities have a functional CL prerequisite of whatever is needed to cast the spell used in its crafting. If you're using some other means of providing those spells (a sufficiently large pile of scrolls/wand/Eternal Wand/etc), then yes, the only CL requirement is whatever is needed to create the base enhancement value.

[Yogibear41]

So what your saying is that at level 6 I could have a +2 holy, Axiomatic, Shock, Flaming longsword, assuming I had the ability to cast all those needed spells(lets say level 6 artificer to make things simple), and that the overall bonus including abilities does not have to be 3x my caster level, only the actualy +1/+2/+3.

[tyckspoon]

Disregarding the XP and GP costs, yes, exactly.

[Yogibear41]

Interesting, did not know that thanks appreciate it.