Normal, Mastercrafted, Cold Iron difference?

[Henry]

The stats on damage and rolls are the same, so what's the difference except in price? Bypass soime resistances like spirits maybe?

[Stink Bug]

Cold Iron is a material type for a weapon which will bypass some creature's damage reduction, of particular relevance many species of Demons. Masterwork is just a non-magical weapon with a +1 attack bonus: they quickly become obsolete as you find magic weapons. Cold Iron can still be useful up until your team gets +3 magic weapons regularly.

[StarcraftJunkie]

Cold Iron bypassed some damage resistance enemies have (mostly demons, and mostly low level demons at that). The way damage resistance to weapons works (and you can see what enemies have by examining them in combat) is generally X/word or X/word and word. X is how much damage is subtracted from each blow if the attack doesn't have whatever criteria is in word (or word and word). So if an enemy has damage reduction 5/cold iron, you need a cold iron weapon to bypass it or else every hit does 5 less damage. If it has 15/magic and cold iron - you need a magic, cold iron weapon to bypass it, or else every hit does 15 less damage. There's a lot of damage resistances, with the most common being magic, cold iron, and good. There's also mythic/epic, silver (mithril counts - I don't think any enemies in the game have this, though - I haven't noticed any, anyway), adamantine, and various alignments (good, evil, lawful, chaos), which is why you'll see certain abilities, spells, and weapon qualities mentioning that they make a weapon counts as good/lawful/etc.

I forget if WotR follows tabletop exactly on this, but certain "plus levels" circumvent this. In the tabletop, +3 and higher counts as cold iron/silver. +4 and higher counts as adamantine, and +5 counts as whatever alignment you need. I want to say that WotR is more generous and has +3 circumvent material requirements (cold iron/silver/adamantine) and +4 circumvent alignment, but I could be remembering wrong. But the gist is the more powerful the magical weapon, the less you need to care about damage reduction.

[StarcraftJunkie]

Also, the difference in masterwork and normal weapons (which is irrelevant to the aforementioned damage reduction) is masterwork weapons get a +1 to attack rolls (not damage). That's it. And all magic weapons are assumed to be masterwork, but their bonus is replaced by the weapon's "plus" enchantment - a +1 weapon gets +1 to attack and damage, +2 to attack and damage, etc. Masterwork weapons are only of use very, very early in the game.

[Henry]

Thanks guys.