Sadly, an astral construct cannot even injure an incorporeal foe at all, because its attacks are merely treated as magic for purposes of overcoming dr, while an incorporeal enemy requires an actual +1 enhancement bonus or greater to injure.
Assuming you are able to augment its natural attacks (say a druid casts magic fang on it), the 50% miss chance would still apply.
Wow, good catch. I hadn't noticed that at all.
So I have the
Ectopic Form feat (Irridescent Serpent), so that my constructs can always have an energy effect. I usually choose fire or electricity, but cold and sonic are available also. Since energy attacks bypass DR, those attacks would work, right? And can those attacks be performed using a melee touch attack instead of the constructs normal Slam attack? (I'm just thinking the AC might be better for a touch attack.)
If you give it Concussion, yes (as it's a Force Effect). Otherwise, not so much. I'd need to look more closely to see if Energy Bolt or Energy Touch could do the job.
I looked at the Energy-type powers and it's not clear at all. While they are manifested through the mental power of the psionicist, they appear to be true elements. Like fire, for example. In a normal game, that would make them magical energy attacks, I suppose, but since this game is not using magic-psionics transparency, I'm at a bit of a loss here.
Before last night's game session ended, I told the GM that I wanted to fire 3 or 4
energy ray effects at the shadows and evaluate how well they did. The GM now has a week to think about it before the question comes up again.
The "do Energy-type powers bypass DR" is actually a pretty important question for this campaign, since I expect we'll be meeting a lot of shadows and similar creatures. And I have a few dorjes loaded with these effects as well.
Thanks for your input so far. I'm fairly new to playing psionics (this is only the second time I've played one and the first was a soulknife many years ago).