Guild Wars 2

I am 100% in favor of removing magic find from gear. Its no small feat to remove something that is deeply integrated into the game, and I respect Anet for doing it. However, I’m worried about how the removal will be handled, and more to the point, I’d like to try to lay out what I feel is the best way it could be handled, so if its not too late, Anet can make the removal go as smoothly as possible, with the minimum amount of disruption.

First, you need to realise that if you remove magic find from gear, you will automatically make it worthless to almost every single player who has it. I have magic find gear for world event farming and when I got it, i didn’t really care about the other stats. I already had my dungeon and “serious business” gear. The magic find gear could have had no other stats for all I cared. And with that magic find stat gone, whatever remains, and whatever attribute takes its place, will, with 100% certainty, be worthless to me. I’ll salvage it just to clear it from my inventory/bank. Unless you give me other options. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is. I will respect you for trying, but it simply can’t be done.

This is where you have to decide how you will handle the fact that with no more magic find, all magic find gear will become worthless to players. In my mind, the best possible way to handle this is to offer refunds wherever you can. In the case of ascended gear and dungeon equipment, you know exactly what was paid for it, and exactly what was done to earn the payment. You could, if you wanted, offer a full refund. I’d even be happy with a partial refund. It would be enough just to know that you recognized that this gear was now worthless to me, and allowing me to recover the cost.

For tradeable equipment, I think it would be really nice if you offered a refund based on the highest buy order on the day of the change, or a nice average of the price history over the past few months, to invalidate any pre-update price fluctuations. Another good method is to give the option to turn the magic find gear into an especially large amount of whatever magic find consumables will be replacing the magic find attribute. This would of course only be offered once, and only with magic find gear you currently own.

I really hope you consider these options for removing magic find, since it would be a real shame if the effort I put into getting magic find gear were to be, overnight, invalidated. Especially my Yakkington’s Ring and Golden Lotus. Oh, also I’m worried about other people too. Honest I am.

I agree with you for the most part. We purchased the gear for the magic find. If that is removed then we purchased useless gear pretty much. Compensation will be in order. I don’t know what they have planned but I think reimbursement for ascended gear should be straight across. That is to say trade it in and get back what you paid for it from that vendor originally. Gear purchased from the trading post I think will have to be more creative. I don’t think a gold compensation will really work. But MF consumables just might. Anyways, good point, long post though. Not a lot of replies, sorry.

A few things

1) If they hadn’t already decided how they were going to handle it, they wouldn’t have made the announcement. I’m sure additional ideas are appreciated, but it’s probably a bit late. On the other hand, it probably hasn’t been coded yet, so anything is possible.

2) I can almost guarantee you that gold refunds based on trading post data will never happen. Issuing millions of refunds based on a value that doesn’t take that number into consideration would not be market-accurate. Such a large influx of gold all at once would also have undesirable economical effects.

3) Unless ANet keeps a transaction log for each player back to the beginning of the game (which I doubt,) refunds for ascended equipment would be difficult to do. Remember that ascended items currently come from multiple sources. ANet can’t very well refund 45 laurels for every ascended ring with magic find on it that hardcore fractal players got as drops over the months.

Weirwynn.2390:

2) I can almost guarantee you that gold refunds based on trading post data will never happen. Issuing millions of refunds based on a value that doesn’t take that number into consideration would not be market-accurate. Such a large influx of gold all at once would also have undesirable economical effects.

I really don’t think it would be that big of a deal, especially if the refund was something like 50% of the TP price. I did say based on, not equal to. Half the price of one piece of MF gear is 2-3 world bosses. Someone with a full MF set would be refunded the equivalent to no more than 30 world bosses, or a few days of farming. But I don’t feel strongly about the TP refunds, and salvaging them into an especially large amount of MF consumables would be totally fine while not having much of an effect on the economy.

3) Unless ANet keeps a transaction log for each player back to the beginning of the game (which I doubt,) refunds for ascended equipment would be difficult to do. Remember that ascended items currently come from multiple sources. ANet can’t very well refund 45 laurels for every ascended ring with magic find on it that hardcore fractal players got as drops over the months.

Presumably, because each method of purchasing them results in an equal item, Anet considers each method equally challenging. Therefore, I don’t see any particular harm in someone who bought it with PFF receiving some laurels instead, nor with someone who got it as a drop selling it for laurels. But if you still think its best to avoid all of that, then why not just allow them to swap their MF ascended gear for a different same-slot ascended trinket? Sure, you’d get people who got a MF ring and were going to throw it away as soon as they could afford a better one, but now they don’t have to. However I believe that’s a small price to pay for avoiding the invalidation of every bit of work that went into people who purchased their MF gear, and now have to throw it away.

Have to agree with the sentiment that it will be mostly worthless afterwards. I am looking forward to getting an actual zerker set for my warrior once it is changed over. But since the replacement sets will be something that hasn’t been seen before, we may very well get something really neat. I’m hoping explorer’s gets either vitality or condition damage myself. So who knows, maybe we’ll get something really awesome.

Personally I’m hoping for boon duration, since the only prefix that gives that now is giver’s. That said, I say it can’t be done, but I still believe that none of this should be automatic, and that players should be able to choose. There really might be that one guy in a thousand who likes the new prefix enough to put it as part of his regular gear.

Imo, it might make more sense an NPC that takes tradeable MF gear for the exact materials needed to craft it.
I agree with you on Ascended, Dungeon and Karma gear.

That’s an idea I hadn’t considered, but if you’re going to do that, why not just make it no longer soulbound?

Perhaps they can make all magic find gear have a 100% chance of being salvaged into magic find consumables. The amount and type of consumable would be based on the rarity/level of the item. Maybe even have the exotic and ascended gear give permanent account-wide magic find consumables.

I kind of assumed the salvageable MF consumables would be awarded in high quantities by default because otherwise it’d be a bad tradeoff… depending on the exact specifics and how exactly they work. Imagine salvaging 10 greens and getting 1 magic find consumable that potentially would give you a rare drop… which you’d sell for 20ish silver. OR you could sell those greens to a vendor and still get 20ish silver. So you’d have to get a consumable closer to 25-50% of the time, or it’d be a huge waste of time. And if you’re getting them that frequently, then its hardly worth anything to have a few 100% chances at getting them. If they’re going to be salvaged into MF consumables, it’d have to be an especially large amount of the normal ones, or ones that are especially effective. But nothing should be a permanent bonus, because that would leave out people who don’t currently have MF gear, and that’s not really fair.

because i used 6 transmute crystals to get my magic find gear to get the skin i wanted on it, i hope they dont make us salavage it.

Personally, i’d like them to do what they said they are going to do when Legendary Armor comes out. In case you didn’t watch that video of the devs talking about the changes to Legendary weapons and the up coming Legendary Armor, let me give a brief description:

Legendary Items will let you change the 3 stats on them, whenever you want, when out of combat. So if you have Twilight and you normally play a tanky warrior build in WvW, you might want Twilight to have PVT stats. But then you party up for a dungeon and want to go full zerker. you can change your Twilight stats to be zerk too. Samething with Legendary Armor, change the stats from PVT to Zerk. I think the only thing you cant change are the runes and sigils.

Now, if the devs are doing this with legendaries. this is how i see the big MF change coming. After they patch and you log in and select you character, if that character has any MF gear equiped or in it’s inventory, a popup will come up and say “you are required to pick new stats for your magic find items”. Click OK, and a window like the transmutation window pops up with your first piece of gear and if that gear is equipped, it will unequip it into your inventory and unsoulbind it. Depending on the gear, depends what you can pick for new stats. For armor and weapons, you should be able to choose any stats that come from dungeons: Berserker, Carrion, Cavalier, Knight, Magi, Rabid, Rampager, Shaman, or Soldier. You can’t choose Settler, Valkyrie, or Celestial. Once you confirm thats the stats you want. It gets placed into your inventory. If that piece of armor or weapon came CoE dungeon, then it becomes account bound. If you MF item was crafted or a mob drop, it become unbounded entirely, allowing you to trade and sell it.

Basically the same thing for ascended trinkets. You pick a standard stat combo availably for that kind of trinket. But ascended items, of course, become only account bound.

In the cause of celestial trinkets, i think they will just remove MF from the stat and add a couple points into another stat. But you dont get to choose new stats for those and they stay soulbound if equip already.

MF infusions in amulets should just disappear and your laurels refunded.

Unfortunately, i think we will be biting the bullet on any Runes and Sigils in our armor and weapons.

If you have any MF items in storage, once you pull them out of storage onto a character, you have to choose new stats.

Nobody really goes for celestial because of the magic find, so it can freely be replaced with no real impact on players. MF runes and sigils are so cheap they’re not worth worrying about. Mainly what I’m concerned about is dungeon tokens and laurels.