Fast to the point: Can I Infuse a "Pact of the Blade" weapon? Is this weapon actually magical? The PHB says it "counts as magical for overcoming resistance and immunity to nonmagical attacks and damage" - does that mean it isn't really magical?
The first line of pact of the blade says, "you can use your action to create a pact weapon in your empty hand. You can choose the form that this melee weapon takes each time you create it." Since you're pulling it out of thin air I would have to call that a magical weapon. It also says you can make a magical weapon a pact weapon but nothing about mundane ones. I suspect you would have a gray area if you infused a mundane weapon and then turned it into a pact weapon. But if your DM is sneaky then you might lose your pact weapon when you over infuse you're gear. The pact would be broken once the infusion left the weapon if you ever needed it elsewhere.
Pulling something out of thin air doesn’t automatically make it magical. The artificer can create nonmagical tools out of thin air. The language “counts as magical for X” strongly suggests that it’s not a magic item in the general sense.
An object can be the product of magic, but not magical. An object could also channel magic, but not be magical (like an arcane focus). An object can also count as magical for limited purposes, yet still not be magical in itself — it’s only fully magical if it says “it becomes magical.” / “it becomes a magic item.” / “it counts as a magic weapon.” etc. with a full stop and no qualifications.
5e makes a distinction between things that contain some low level of magic and things that contain enough magic to be considered magical for the purposes of rejecting infusions, the magic weapon spell, etc. Arcane Armor is a great example of this — the class feature transforms your armor in various magical ways and lets it do magical things, but doesn’t make it a magic item by itself.
Worth noting: Infusions can only be created/stood down/mucked with at the end of a long rest. A Pact weapon, of the conjured, strictly-temporary variety, would have to exist at the time Infusions can be mucked with, and then continue existing throughout the Infusion's run time. There's a valid argument to be made that a temporarily conjured Pact weapon isn't a valid target for an Infusion in the first place, and some DMs might well say that one cannot infuse an object without any permanence.
It's worth noting that a mundane weapon can be Infused, thereby becoming magical and thus a valid target for the Pact of the Blade's magical-binding feature. There's janky interactions there as well, namely what happens when an Infusion falls off a Pact weapon currently hammerspace'd, but it's less prone to Fry Meming than trying to infuse what amounts to the holographic projection of a real-boy weapon.
Objects can break, so no object is completely permanent. If an object bearing an infusion broke, the infusion would simply end. I imagine the same would happen for a weapon that got unpacted. It is certainly unusual, however.
A summoned pact weapon is innately considered magical for the purposes of resistances and an infusion has to be placed into a non-magical item, so I don't think it would work, but as pointed out above, you could do it the other way around. Infuse an item and then turn it into your pact weapon. I would rule that it would cease being your pact weapon if the infusion breaks, appearing at your feet as if you'd broken the bond.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
A summoned pact weapon is considered magical only for the purpose of overcoming resistance and immunity to nonmagical attacks and damage, there is nothing that gives the weapon itself any form of magical resistances.
As written, a summoned pact weapon that gained an infusion would be treated as a summoned pact weapon for the purposes of what happens to it when the caster is more than 5 feet away from it for 1 minute or if you choose to dismiss it, despite gaining the magic weapon properties, because it wasn't a magic weapon at the time that it became your pact weapon. As written, attempting the 1 hour bonding ritual on a summoned pact weapon that had an infusion placed on it, would give it the benefits of being a bonded magical weapon, causing it to be shunted to the extradimensional space whenever it would otherwise disappear in the aforementioned situations.
The weirdness of the situation actually gets weirder when it comes to breaking that bond. Going by the rules, as written, when you break that bond, causes it to cease to be your pact weapon, but doesn't meet any of the written conditions for making it disappear, and thus the weapon now simply just exists as a weapon with one of your infusions on it. Since it's no longer your pact weapon, it no longer abides by the rules of being your pact weapon.
Things are a little more straightforward when it comes to losing its infusion while it's bonded. It remains your bonded pact weapon, thus causing you to only be able to summon that weapon when you summon your pact weapon, until you break said bond.
Either way, using the conjure pact weapon feature, infusion feature, and bonded pact weapon feature, effectively gives the weapon permanency in existence, but not permanency in being magical, and has the potential to be a very convoluted, but effective, way of making counterfeits of famous weapons, since the warlock chooses the form it takes when it's first conjured. Such counterfeiting is limited to just melee weapons, unless one has the improved pact weapon invocation, which expands such to bows and crossbows too.
Fast to the point: Can I Infuse a "Pact of the Blade" weapon? Is this weapon actually magical? The PHB says it "counts as magical for overcoming resistance and immunity to nonmagical attacks and damage" - does that mean it isn't really magical?
The first line of pact of the blade says, "you can use your action to create a pact weapon in your empty hand. You can choose the form that this melee weapon takes each time you create it." Since you're pulling it out of thin air I would have to call that a magical weapon. It also says you can make a magical weapon a pact weapon but nothing about mundane ones. I suspect you would have a gray area if you infused a mundane weapon and then turned it into a pact weapon. But if your DM is sneaky then you might lose your pact weapon when you over infuse you're gear. The pact would be broken once the infusion left the weapon if you ever needed it elsewhere.
Pulling something out of thin air doesn’t automatically make it magical. The artificer can create nonmagical tools out of thin air. The language “counts as magical for X” strongly suggests that it’s not a magic item in the general sense.
An object can be the product of magic, but not magical. An object could also channel magic, but not be magical (like an arcane focus). An object can also count as magical for limited purposes, yet still not be magical in itself — it’s only fully magical if it says “it becomes magical.” / “it becomes a magic item.” / “it counts as a magic weapon.” etc. with a full stop and no qualifications.
5e makes a distinction between things that contain some low level of magic and things that contain enough magic to be considered magical for the purposes of rejecting infusions, the magic weapon spell, etc. Arcane Armor is a great example of this — the class feature transforms your armor in various magical ways and lets it do magical things, but doesn’t make it a magic item by itself.
Worth noting: Infusions can only be created/stood down/mucked with at the end of a long rest. A Pact weapon, of the conjured, strictly-temporary variety, would have to exist at the time Infusions can be mucked with, and then continue existing throughout the Infusion's run time. There's a valid argument to be made that a temporarily conjured Pact weapon isn't a valid target for an Infusion in the first place, and some DMs might well say that one cannot infuse an object without any permanence.
It's worth noting that a mundane weapon can be Infused, thereby becoming magical and thus a valid target for the Pact of the Blade's magical-binding feature. There's janky interactions there as well, namely what happens when an Infusion falls off a Pact weapon currently hammerspace'd, but it's less prone to Fry Meming than trying to infuse what amounts to the holographic projection of a real-boy weapon.
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Objects can break, so no object is completely permanent. If an object bearing an infusion broke, the infusion would simply end. I imagine the same would happen for a weapon that got unpacted. It is certainly unusual, however.
A summoned pact weapon is innately considered magical for the purposes of resistances and an infusion has to be placed into a non-magical item, so I don't think it would work, but as pointed out above, you could do it the other way around. Infuse an item and then turn it into your pact weapon. I would rule that it would cease being your pact weapon if the infusion breaks, appearing at your feet as if you'd broken the bond.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
A summoned pact weapon is considered magical only for the purpose of overcoming resistance and immunity to nonmagical attacks and damage, there is nothing that gives the weapon itself any form of magical resistances.
As written, a summoned pact weapon that gained an infusion would be treated as a summoned pact weapon for the purposes of what happens to it when the caster is more than 5 feet away from it for 1 minute or if you choose to dismiss it, despite gaining the magic weapon properties, because it wasn't a magic weapon at the time that it became your pact weapon. As written, attempting the 1 hour bonding ritual on a summoned pact weapon that had an infusion placed on it, would give it the benefits of being a bonded magical weapon, causing it to be shunted to the extradimensional space whenever it would otherwise disappear in the aforementioned situations.
The weirdness of the situation actually gets weirder when it comes to breaking that bond. Going by the rules, as written, when you break that bond, causes it to cease to be your pact weapon, but doesn't meet any of the written conditions for making it disappear, and thus the weapon now simply just exists as a weapon with one of your infusions on it. Since it's no longer your pact weapon, it no longer abides by the rules of being your pact weapon.
Things are a little more straightforward when it comes to losing its infusion while it's bonded. It remains your bonded pact weapon, thus causing you to only be able to summon that weapon when you summon your pact weapon, until you break said bond.
Either way, using the conjure pact weapon feature, infusion feature, and bonded pact weapon feature, effectively gives the weapon permanency in existence, but not permanency in being magical, and has the potential to be a very convoluted, but effective, way of making counterfeits of famous weapons, since the warlock chooses the form it takes when it's first conjured. Such counterfeiting is limited to just melee weapons, unless one has the improved pact weapon invocation, which expands such to bows and crossbows too.