Despite the fact that this is the Playground, and someone can doubtless provide numbers on the relative effectiveness of various enchantment combinations vs expected foes, I think we'll likely have difficulty comparing "+5 weapon" vs "pearl of power" vs "spending spell slots (and spending the money on something else)".

I think that it's fair to say that, when you don't have a party / don't know who might be in your party, a) if you cannot cast the spell yourself, you may regret not improving it to +5 (depending on your build); when you can enchant the weapon yourself and actually want to use a weapon (Cleric, primarily), you're probably better off with just a +1 weapon, most of the time.

This, and my experiences, suggest to me that the optimal answer, for the optimal party, is to have a +1 weapon, and enchant it with Greater Magic Weapon, -unless- you happen to find a +5 weapon as part of random treasure (in which case, selling it back for half may not be worth the gear it buys, depending on the character's build).

So, for really simple math, a +3 weapon is worth 18k, sells for 9k. That buys you a +2 equivalent weapon, with 1k left over. A level 6 übercharger, or crit fisher, or CoDzilla who rolled a really lucky "exactly what they were looking for / proficient in" +3 weapon - would they keep it? Should they keep it? Let's pretend that whatever weapon they were using just got destroyed, so there's no "but they would already have a weapon" issues to contend with.

My guess is as follows: the crit fisher really wants "keen", and would sell it for a +1 keen weapon, pocketing the 1k; the Cleric, unable to cast Greater Magic Weapon just yet would keep the +3 for now, and sell it next level; the übercharger would keep the +3 for a very long time (or until they rolled something better).

The Cleric would be sad if someone successfully dispelled their Greater Magic Weapon (because, unlike the +3 bonus, it won't just come back in 1d4 rounds)… but, then again, they'd be sad if someone dispelled any of the dwoemers that keep them competitive.

Thoughts?