Quote:
Originally Posted by scc
OK, one trick that some people don't seem to catch is that as a Staff can be up to six feet long you can put a Powerstone at each end and they won't interfere with each other's recharging. Now presumably you can draw upon both of these for a single spell, breaking the normal rule of one Powerstone per spell.
Now this on it's own is very powerful as you're doubling your recharge speed and significantly cutting cost.
But for enchanting, which is so highly limited by energy this could be very attractive.
Which brings me to my question: Can I use a Staff with embedded Powerstones to enchant? If so are there any limitations?
|
You can't use more than one Powerstone to power a spell because that's a limitation on Powerstones. It has nothing to do with how close or far apart they are from each other. A wizard who is 6'4" could wear a powerstone in his hatband and another on his boot with 6' of separation and they'd recharge at full rate, but he still couldn't use both of them in the same spell.
Dedicated powerstones provide twice as much energy when used to cast spells by or through the relevant magic item. None of the Enchant spells can be Enchanted into an item so that you can the spell by the item, so that's out.
It isn't clear if you can cast Enchantment spells through an item enchanted with the Staff spell: the effects of the Staff spell (p 13) mostly deal with Regular, Area, and Melee spells, and Enchantment spells are a different class. Let's assume you can, using the default magic item economics on pages 20-24 of Magic:
A circle of 6 mages can create Q&D items of up to 60 energy for about $1/energy at the rate of 22 items per week.
A lone wizard with a Staff item ($30) and a 25 point dedicated Powerstone ($12,000) can create a Q&D item of up to 60 energy every 25 days. It takes an hour of his time ($4). Assuming he wants to pay off the item in 5 years, he needs to make $12,000 + $30 + $4 * 5 * 365 / 25, or $12,322 by selling the 73 items he created - or $170 per item. So this is not a good solution for making money.
However, if you're a lone wizard on an island with nothing but your trusty Staff and 10 available FP, you can could create a 6 energy Dedicated Manastone in about a day's work and use that to cast Powerstone. Without the Dedicated Manastone, you'd need a 10 energy Manastone, and that would take 2 days to create. So if you don't have access to a circle of mages and you need to rebuild your wizardly tools, Dedicated Staff Manastones are useful.