Guild Wars 2

Everybody kittenes about MF being a useless stat — and for good reason. It uses up a slot that could be put to better use, it has no demonstrable benefits, and leaves you feeling embittered about wasting your money.

Every now and again a humour will take me where I’ll equip my magic find for a week straight and go through all the events I normally do. Do you know what happens?
1. In Orr, I get far fewer loot bags, which translates into fewer good crafting materials I can sell for much higher profit than the useless blues I get instead.
2. In dungeons… I’m not as effective. I am missing a third combat-oriented stat. I don’t get any better drops, chests don’t give me anything more valuable, and I just get frustrated.
3. In random exploration/events I maybe get one extra rare throughout the week.

Of the handful of exotics that have dropped for me, not a single one of them has ever been while I had MF armour on — or even when I had any magic find boost at all (including omnoms). Do you know what that leads me to brand MF as? Useless.

As ArenaNet refuses to publish the loot table, we are forced to speculate and improvise. This thread is about suggestions regarding how to make MF more useful and/or effective… essentially, worth the investment.

My suggestions are as follows (choose any or all):
-Remove any seeming diminishing returns that occur past 30%
-Make it a party buff, though allies receive only a portion (40%) with diminishing returns for each additional party member giving the buff (i.e. 10% less effective for the 2nd person’s buff, 25% less effective for the 3rd person’s buff, etc.)
-Improve the effectiveness by 50%; if I have 50% MF that should improve my 1/10 chance to a 2/10 chance, rather than having to stack 100% for such a minimal increase
-For the love of Pete, keep the loot bags in Orr, but improve the chance of getting rare (400) ingredients like ancient bones out of them, influenced by MF
-Make chests influenced by MF
-Make salvages influenced by MF
-Make gatherings influenced by MF (having a separate buff for this in guild banners is a waste)

That’s all I have for right now… someone else make suggestions.

Far as I’m concerned, the issue is that no one seems to know what magic find actually does in the code, so we aren’t able to determine what the benefit is. I wouldn’t be surprised if anet made it do literally nothing, making good luck charms in the game as effective as good luck charms in real life. We need some definitive and measurable boost.. I retract this, thank you for correcting me

I’d recommend not touching rarity of what does drop, but instead, increasing drop frequency. Let’s say that with no mf, you have 30% chance of the mob dropping something (literally a guess out of the blue)- having say +50% magic find would boost that to a 45% chance of it dropping something. (doesn’t have to be a linear ramp like that, could be exponential etc)

The calculation of what that drop is would remain the same; rare drops per time interval would increase due to drops per interval increase, and there’d be no need to deliberate over what’s better than what else to get in a drop.

Piogre: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magic_find#Notes
See also the section below notes titled References.

ZenonSeth.5739:

Piogre: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magic_find#Notes
See also the section below notes titled References.

I retract my statement regarding lack of information. That said, I still feel my offered suggestion might improve the utility of mf gear