Guild Wars 2

Even if we can’t have ArenaNet define Magic Find mechanics for us, could they let us know that we are on our own in figuring out how it works. I just started investing in MF and reading so many conflicting posts, I would love a transparent description of what MF find affects, chests, drops, improves quality of items? or improves amount of items etc? from the devs

Anyway I hope its not out of line to ask, It would just make me a lot less stressed out trying to figure MF’s value out.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Seems pointless to me in a game where gear doesn’t matter

gear do matter in guild wars 2

If it works anything like it works in other games, then this quote I wrote up for a thread the other day is still relevant and possibly correct.

I think the way magic find works is applying a percentage to a percentage.

So say you have 100% magic find for a nice even number to make an example with.

Baseline(Numbers made up for example):
You have 60% chance to find a white item.
You have 30% chance to find a blue item.
You have 15% chance to find a green item.
You have 5% chance to find a yellow item.
You have 2% chance to find an exotic item.

So adding on your 100% magic find, it would double your chances of finding an item. Basically adding the percent onto itself, because you have 100% of it again. However, if your chance to find an item goes over 100%, I think ANet probably limited the chances to find something. So I imagine that Magic Find would have a sort of ‘soft cap’ at a certain percentage of finding items, based on the tier of item.

So that 60% chance to find a white item would increase to 80%(? Based on if there’s a ‘cap’ to magic find, so you never have 100% chance to find something).
Your blue would increase to 60%(or lower, if there’s a cap)
Your green would increase to 30%.
Your yellow would increase to 10%.
Your exotic would increase to 4%.

And at the same time, I imagine that each mob simply has a chance to drop nothing. And that the ‘drop table’ is figured into a 100% range. So that it would condense down your drop percentage numbers.

So say a mob has 30% chance to drop nothing at all. Increasing your magic find would then change what’s possible to find on the mob, or even reduce the percentage of finding nothing, giving your more loot in the long run.

This is where my math breaks down because I’m terrible at it, but hopefully I can still give you an idea of the idea I’m trying to get across.

So say the mob has 30% chance to drop nothing. It has a 10% chance to drop a grey vendor item. And then a 10% chance to drop a bag(say a “Moldy Bag” for a Risen mob.). That leaves 50% chance to drop something else.

So of that 50%, there’s, say, 20% chance to drop a white, 15% chance to drop a blue, 10% to drop a green, 4% to drop a yellow, and 1% to drop an exotic.
Increasing your magic find could possibly affect a few things. So let’s use 100% magic find again.

Increasing your magic find by 100% would decrease your chance to find nothing by half(100% chance to find something, and 100% less chance to find nothing), so you now have only 15% chance to find nothing on the mob. 5% chance to find a gray(Since grays aren’t very desirable and aren’t ‘magic’). And say a static 10% chance to find a bag, but perhaps that bag has better loot.

So that leaves 70% chance to find something nice on the mob. 40% chance to find a white, 30% chance to find a blue, 20% chance to find a green, 8% chance to find a yellow, and 2% chance to find an exotic. But wait, that’s over 70% chance to find something.

I imagine Magic Find would prioritize the chance to find something better over something lesser. So the extra chance to find something of lesser quality would get pushed off of the ‘drop table’, so to speak. So 2% chance for an exotic, plus 8% chance to find a yellow, is 10% chance. Add 20% for green is 30%, then 30% for blue is 60%. So most of that 40% chance to find a white gets pushed off the table, leaving you only 10% chance to find a white, and much better chances, probability-wise, to find something nice.

This is all just a theory and is probably wrong, but this is the most logical way I can think of it working.

Basically having Magic Find past a certain number would stop decreasing your chances to find nothing(Since I imagine there’s a cap), but would still be beneficial because it’s increasing your chances to find better things. At least if it works the way I think it works.

Would really love an answer to this. I been searching on the forum and other sites and it seems no one really know how it works. People just deck themselves up with magic find items because they are desperate for items.

It would be great if someone in the know could offer a few answers to the following questions:

1) Does Magic find increase the chance you get an items or does it increase the chance it being a rare item or it does both.

2) Does Magic find items and other magic find bonus ( eg guild or consumable) stack?

3) Does Magic find increase your base chance or does it multiply your base chance? EG if I wear a total of 101% magic find gear and (let say) I have 10% base chance something drop. Do I now have 111% chance or 20% chance of getting something.

Like many others I would really appreciate some explanations.

@ Cloudwalkernz.1328
as far as 3 is concerned the way I understand it the answer is 20% . After all if you had a 111% chance of rare loot inflation would be through the roof

The Wiki should answer the other questions
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magic_find

I would think it’s something more akin to a base stat of MF=.5% or less. If you stack armor bonuses and food bonuses, you get a bump but it’s still misniscule enough that it won’t affect the economy. When I say economy, I mean the real economy of gold to gems. ArenaNet is concerned most with the gem shop and that is affected by the BLTC. They won’t let the BLTC affect the gem shop dramatically. The gem shop represents their income. Without them having a sustainable income, we don’t have a game. I don’t need to say it, but that can’t be allowed to happen.

As far as gold to gems goes, I don’t think MF presents a major inflation issue. Even if prices on the TP for individual items fluctuate, the amount of actual gold entering the economy wouldn’t be affected much. For this I’ll quote the Anet stats they posted a while ago that stated that only ~7-8% of gold entering the economy comes from drops sold to vendors. The majority comes from DEs/map rewards/dungeons, etc. So even if MF drives down the prices of Rares and Exotics, for example, it wouldn’t have a significant effect on the amount of actual currency coming into the game because it doesn’t affect the chance of mobs dropping loot, only the quality of it. There would be an effect from people getting more green/blue drops that sell for higher than while/gray, but with sales to vendors making up such a small percentage of the overall economy, increasing the amount of gold generated this way even by, say 50%, would be fairly negligible.

Cloudwalkernz.1328:

Would really love an answer to this. I been searching on the forum and other sites and it seems no one really know how it works. People just deck themselves up with magic find items because they are desperate for items.

It would be great if someone in the know could offer a few answers to the following questions:

1) Does Magic find increase the chance you get an items or does it increase the chance it being a rare item or it does both.

2) Does Magic find items and other magic find bonus ( eg guild or consumable) stack?

3) Does Magic find increase your base chance or does it multiply your base chance? EG if I wear a total of 101% magic find gear and (let say) I have 10% base chance something drop. Do I now have 111% chance or 20% chance of getting something.

Like many others I would really appreciate some explanations.

MF is multiplicative, not additive. 50% MF turns a 1% rate into a 1.5%, not a 51%.

what ever mf is, it is a waste of gold for sure with this stupid dr in place

Sephelutis.3480:

what ever mf is, it is a waste of gold for sure with this stupid dr in place

Ya, you are wrong but thanks for playing.

MF is not useless unless you decide to let DR kick in. For me I do multiple zones and so i never hit MF and I still get drops.

MF becomes even more meaningful. Now that the number of drops you receive become limited with DR, you would like those drops to be of higher quality items. To do that you’ll need more MF.

I can anecdotally say that + Magic Find does not does increase the quantity of items received but it does increase the quality of items.

The DR code in essence caps the quantity of items received in a specific time period session on mob kills per time. The DR is slowly removed by “x” amount of time after not killing anything. The actual quantity of items does not increase percentage wise; the quality (white -> blue, blue -> green, green -> yellow, yellow -> orange) is directly correlated to the +MF amount (although there may be mathematical tiers/soft caps).

This is why you are having conflicting reports of +MF and Diminishing Returns. Both of you are correct. If +MF is used, you are noticing a substantial decrease (as players, we get more efficient/smarter in hitting that cap sooner every day) because you are hitting the quantity item cap sooner. If all you did was play for 30 minutes though, you’d never even be phased (the latter report).

Note, I hit the DR cap in Orr today by first doing the Arah chain followed immediately by the Plinx chain. By the end of Plinx, I was getting next to nothing dropped. That’s how quick DR kicks in (8-10 events back to back) under two different chains (~40-45 minutes play time).

In essence, +Magic Find is even more important now after DR changes because you have a limited ‘farming’ period of maximum quality drop rates.

I’m also fairly certain that particular items (dyes, Black Lion chests and grey trash items are not affected by +MF).

EDIT: What is missing in the DR code is the relative distance of event chains from one another AND that event chains (many mini-mobs in a short amount of time that is scaled based on the number of players present in the event) is not taken into account.