How critical is equipment?

[Ridley's Cohort]

our group is relly poor for it's level and like most people are saying at the up levels it matters when you fight a monster with DR 15/magic and no one in the 10 lvl party has a +1 weapon it become very life threating.

Magic Weapon is only a 1st level spell. 8 of the 11 core classes have some reasonable means of accessing that or similar magic by low-mid levels.

If you cannot scrape together 25 gp for a scroll, then you really should consider dipping a level in a casting class so you can prep Magic Weapon, just in case.

My Paladin had been fighting loads of extraplanar weirdness and he did not acquire his first decent +1 sword until 8th level. MW and Magic Weapon or Bless Weapon were good enough.

Yours is a much more extreme situation, but it is solvable.