Penetrating Strike and elemental damage

[Aria Athena]

Shouldn't Penetrating Strike also work with Elemental Damage reductions?

I have a weapon that deals Force Damage, whatever that is, and including Improved Critical I think I have wasted 3 feats.

[jsaving]

There are various types of elemental resistance/protection/immunity but none of them officially count as DR, unfortunately.

[LordSerion]

Force Damage deals full damage to incorporeal enemies, like ghosts. Regular weapons only deal half damage to them.

[Aria Athena]

So it's more useful than I thought. Still annoyed with the wasted feats though.

[=[NK]= Col. Jack O'Neil]

Use the ingame respec or the mod

[JonWoo]

Force is just a damage type like fire or acid. Improved Critical is a great feat if you're sticking to one weapon type but it doesn't stack with something like Keen or another feature that increases the crit range of a weapon. So if you got the effect from something else then yes, it's wasted.

[=[NK]= Col. Jack O'Neil]

What is the description of penetrating strike?

Like Jon said, keen enhancement for a weapon and improved critical feat don't stack, so choose one or the other.

I don't know if ghost touched weapon enhancements are in the game (I play with the crafting mod), but that deals full damage to incorporeal enemies, as would force damage.

[Aria Athena]

"Your attacks made with weapons selected with Weapon Focus ignore up to 5/10 points of damage reduction"

Tbh I doubt many things have Force resistance since it's barely a thing. Even the Spawn of Mwahaha who had 20, same with all his other elemental resistances, doesn't actually have it listed when you inspect him. He probably just have it because they gave him a flat 20 elemental res and that just happened to include Force.

[=[NK]= Col. Jack O'Neil]

Originally posted by Aria Athena:

"Your attacks made with weapons selected with Weapon Focus ignore up to 5/10 points of damage reduction"

Tbh I doubt many things have Force resistance since it's barely a thing. Even the Spawn of Mwahaha who had 20, same with all his other elemental resistances, doesn't actually have it listed when you inspect him. He probably just have it because they gave him a flat 20 elemental res and that just happened to include Force.

I don't know what the ingame description is but the one you posted didn't make much sense, so this is the one from d20pfsrd.com

Your attacks made with weapons selected with Weapon Focus ignore up to 5 points of damage reduction. This feat does not apply to damage reduction without a type (such as DR 10/—).

So dr/force isn't a thing in pf as far as I'm aware, and it clearly states that it ignores dr/5 when there are named types of damage reduction. As some enemies have a flat dr reduction of everything, which this fear wouldn't apply to.

[Aria Athena]

The definitions are the same, I just mashed Penetrating and Greater Penetrating Strike together.

These feats looks more useless by the minute.

[=[NK]= Col. Jack O'Neil]

The biggest thing about pathfinder is you can't generalise the descriptions.

How do you think it's useless? Especially if you have a 2 weapon fighter that doesn't deal as much damage as a two hander, you could be bypassing 10 points of damage.

Not many creatures have a flat dr

[Aria Athena]

I meant mostly for me.

[kaymarciy]

Penetrating strike is more of a PnP feat where a regular lvl10 rogue will have somethig like a pair of +2 daggers, a belt +4 Dex and Piranha strike. And theoetically they aren't supposed to have 20 Dex on lvl1, because roleplay. So the damage will be around 1d4+10. If they stand against an enemy with DR 10, they'll be doing ~2 damage per hit; with the Greater Penetration it will be ~12. Now take into the equation that rogue will have about 4 attacks per round and the difference become huge. But in this game where player minmax characters in like 1d4 +45 witht some OP gear, the feat naturally feels useles.

[Lagy_Paladin]

Unless your playing a fighter and ran out of feats to pick there are better options to take.

[Aria Athena]

I am playing a fighter. I guess I'll go for the three +2 saves, although I'm feeling too lazy to respec at this point.