Putting essence on first

[Sab1]

I know from experience if you enchant say fire damage on a weapon and then put a perm essence of it that it gets rid of the basin damage. But I was told if you essence a weapon first and then put enchant damage that both stay. So what's the difference, why does it only overwrite the basin damage if done first and the essence isn't if you do the essence first?

[Baron Saturday]

Because essencing a weapon always works, while enchanting it often fails. So to get a stronger weapon, you have to accept a larger risk.

[Nitro]

Otherwise you could enchant every weapon with elemental damage, then essence it safely with 0 added risk. The essence overwriting other elemental damage is also an easy way to make essences not stack with other essences.

[Sab1]

I was thinking more of runed items, such as dale swords etc... where there is no real chance of enchanting failure. Seems odd enchant and then essence means enchant damage removed but essence then enchant and you get both.

[Baron Saturday]

Putting the essence on first still raises the cost of the enchantment, which I imagine would be considerable on a weapon like the Dale sword. And, as Nitro said, it's just a very easy way to keep people from stacking essences.

[msterswrdsmn]

Essences won't remove -every- bonus damage source either. It will only remove universal elemental damage bonuses (EX: 1d6 fire on a sword). I won't remove things like alignment-based damage bonuses (1d10 vs evil) or racial bonuses (1d10 vs animal) from what i've seen.

Bear in mind, I have not done any experimenting with the vs racial group essences, so I can't comment on those.