I have had a little over 100 magic find for a while and have not gotten any more rare or exotic items than when i don’t use it. It’s a placebo effect in my opinion. One thing i wonder is why ArenaNet won’t explain exactly how MF works. It get me to thinking that in actuality it does not work. Maybe it was meant to work but the screwed up in coding or something. They don’t explain how it works because they themselves have no idea. To me the mechanic is broken and should be addressed or at least let us now how it works or let us know that they are aware it is not working as intended. I am done with it. I have just as much a chance to get a rare item without it as i do with it. Am i alone on this? If anyone out there has some info that may explain MF please do fill me in.
Edited by moderator:removed CoC infraction from the thread title
They have explained how it works. Chris explained it in the recent AMA, and the explanation verified that it works pretty much how the people on the forums theorized that it works.
Loot is broken in to tiers or rarity, each tier has a different percentage to be picked. Magic find gets applied to the rarer tiers chance to be chosen giving them a higher percentage. If a mobs exotic loot table has a 0.3% draw chance, then 100% mf adds another 0.3% for a 0.6% chance over-all.
Yeah a 100% increase is only noticeable over a massive scale of slaughtering… since mf only affects drops from enemies, not chests or other stuff. I personally don’t like it for this game (i’m more for food that increases gold drops), but people put a different value on this stat.
There is no hard cap as far as I know. There is a soft-cap of what is realistically attainable. Explorer armor with doubloons or other MF upgrades + 3 day MF guild boost + 30 min MF guild banner + MF consumable. They all stack.
The 0.3% chance for exotic is just a guessed value.
It is probably <0.01% (which would mean ~1 out of 10000 looting would include an exotic. It is far less than that). Just thing about an event where 50 mobs would be killed by 10 players. That would be around 500 possible lootings. With one in 10000 exotics would almost be a ‘common’ loot. 100% chance increase isn’t alot after all.
There was/is that Powerball jackpot in the U.S. afaik (not from the U.S.), and exotics are like the jackpot. If you buy 2 tickets, you double your chance to win. It’s still very unlikely to win though.
Been there done that. No difference as far as i can tell.
Don’t know what you are doing wrong then. We farmed CS a bit last night. My MF was only 26%. And there is a noticeable difference in loot if I forget to use my food (18%). Maybe you aren’t taggiing enough of the mob.
PF/ GOAT on Tarnished Coast (Semi-Retired)
Raf Longshanks-80 Norn Guardian / 9 more alts of various lvls / Charter Member Altaholics Anon
I get noticeably more green drops when using MF than when I don’t. It doesn’t apply to the exotic loot tables only.
Green might not be rare or exotic, but it’s still better merch food than blue or nothing and if I get four of a kind in a run I just throw them in the forge to try and promote.
Been there done that. No difference as far as i can tell.
Don’t know what you are doing wrong then. We farmed CS a bit last night. My MF was only 26%. And there is a noticeable difference in loot if I forget to use my food (18%). Maybe you aren’t taggiing enough of the mob.
RNG is RNG. I ran with MF gear for a month and didn’t get a single rare. Replaced my gear away from MF and got 3 rares the same day. Since then I’ve been getting rares almost every day. All I know is that, for me, MF gear is worthless.
Im not really convinced grouping makes a difference in getting better loot.
Last night I ran with a party (using about 130mf) and I walked out with 2 rares in 2 hours time. I was lucky though and salvaged 6 ectos from those 2.
The night before however, I ran solo as all parties were full and I walked away with 25 rares in 2 hours time. When I don’t party up with anyone, I usually acquire anywhere from 15-25 rares within 2 hours.
RNG is RNG but to me, that type of difference is just to vast.
Here’s the thing. The system is still based on RNG – MF just increases the chances of rare drops. So floods of rare and exotic drops and droughts of only porous bones are still going to happen with or without it, as it’s still gambling. 100% MF does ‘double’ your chance at rare loot, but it’s still RNG, so as people it all just feels the same. Who’s to say two exotic drops back to back (lol) were due to extreme luck or actually because of more MF? We can’t tell. I do use MF by the way.
Overall, considering the tiny percentages, MF Gear is Laughably overpriced… and not worth it. I have full MF, and ‘Luck’ on Weps, but, I see ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE when using it as compared to my non MF gear. (Full Travelers Set) Oh well. Waste of gold and upgrade slots IMO.
The 0.3% chance for exotic is just a guessed value.
It is probably <0.01% (which would mean ~1 out of 10000 looting would include an exotic. It is far less than that). Just thing about an event where 50 mobs would be killed by 10 players. That would be around 500 possible lootings. With one in 10000 exotics would almost be a ‘common’ loot. 100% chance increase isn’t alot after all.
There was/is that Powerball jackpot in the U.S. afaik (not from the U.S.), and exotics are like the jackpot. If you buy 2 tickets, you double your chance to win. It’s still very unlikely to win though.
The percentage is multiplicative, not additive. If you have a 1 in 4 chance of a ticket winning, having 4 tickets doesn’t mean you’ll have a 100% chance but instead more like 50% or so. In other words, they don’t stack. For all we know, having 100% MF in gear may not actually yield 100% MF if each piece is multiplicative.
I can provide a better explanation later when I’m not stuck using my phone.
The percentage is multiplicative, not additive. If you have a 1 in 4 chance of a ticket winning, having 4 tickets doesn’t mean you’ll have a 100% chance but instead more like 50% or so. In other words, they don’t stack. For all we know, having 100% MF in gear may not actually yield 100% MF if each piece is multiplicative.
I can provide a better explanation later when I’m not stuck using my phone.
That’s right. If magic find works in this way, then consider the lottery ticket example. Each ticket has a 1/4 chance to win. The chance of getting AT LEAST ONE winning ticket is:
1 – [the probability of NOT getting a winning ticket]^(# of tickets)
1 – [0.75]^4 = 1- 0.31640625 = 0.68359375
So, having more than one ticket definitely increases your chance of winning, but it is not additive. As you buy more tickets, your chance of winning asymptotically approaches 100%, but you never actually reach 100%.
The percentage is multiplicative, not additive. If you have a 1 in 4 chance of a ticket winning, having 4 tickets doesn’t mean you’ll have a 100% chance but instead more like 50% or so. In other words, they don’t stack. For all we know, having 100% MF in gear may not actually yield 100% MF if each piece is multiplicative.
I can provide a better explanation later when I’m not stuck using my phone.
That’s right. If magic find works in this way, then consider the lottery ticket example. Each ticket has a 1/4 chance to win. The chance of getting AT LEAST ONE winning ticket is:
1 – [the probability of NOT getting a winning ticket]^(# of tickets)
1 – [0.75]^4 = 1- 0.31640625 = 0.68359375
So, having more than one ticket definitely increases your chance of winning, but it is not additive. As you buy more tickets, your chance of winning asymptotically approaches 100%, but you never actually reach 100%.
The lottery ticket was just a small example to give an idea of how it is working. It was never and can never be a 100% accurate comparisson between MF and the lottery for a simple reason:
In the lottery one number must win.
If there are 1,000,000 different combinations possible (powerball currently has 175,223,510 different combination on a sidenote), then buying 1,000,000 tickets means you will win, unless you buy one combination twice, and therefore missing another combination.
Looting a mob does not ‘always have a winner’, even if a unlimited amount of players could and would loot that mob, it doesn’t guarantee that someone gets an exotic.
Magic Find is currently probably broken. People are reporting that it decreases their drops instead of increasing, starting from the time the drop rate was altered for champs and drop rates all over the world plummeted. On the AMA Chris Whiteside said it was probably a bug and they were investigating, so we’ll probably see some changes soonish.
Gilosean, actually I ran the numbers before the loot drop but and higher magic find had a lower drop rate, and could not get a response from ANet about it. The loot bug exposed this even more since you get alot less loot to begin with.
Here is the general run down of what my investigation showed.
1. higher magic find lowered the drop rate by 26%
2. % drops of whites/blues/greens actually lowered
3. % drops of crafting materials and items that result in crafting materials (bags/salvagable) increased.
4. % of junk and yellow items stayed the same.
Conclussion, if you want more coin, dont use MF, if you want more crafting materials, use MF. Especially note that you have a greater chance of getting more yellow items without MF in a set time period than with MF due to the lower drop rate MF causes.
The percentage is multiplicative, not additive. If you have a 1 in 4 chance of a ticket winning, having 4 tickets doesn’t mean you’ll have a 100% chance but instead more like 50% or so. In other words, they don’t stack. For all we know, having 100% MF in gear may not actually yield 100% MF if each piece is multiplicative.
I can provide a better explanation later when I’m not stuck using my phone.
That’s right. If magic find works in this way, then consider the lottery ticket example. Each ticket has a 1/4 chance to win. The chance of getting AT LEAST ONE winning ticket is:
1 – [the probability of NOT getting a winning ticket]^(# of tickets)
1 – [0.75]^4 = 1- 0.31640625 = 0.68359375
So, having more than one ticket definitely increases your chance of winning, but it is not additive. As you buy more tickets, your chance of winning asymptotically approaches 100%, but you never actually reach 100%.
The lottery ticket was just a small example to give an idea of how it is working. It was never and can never be a 100% accurate comparisson between MF and the lottery for a simple reason:
In the lottery one number must win.
If there are 1,000,000 different combinations possible (powerball currently has 175,223,510 different combination on a sidenote), then buying 1,000,000 tickets means you will win, unless you buy one combination twice, and therefore missing another combination.
Looting a mob does not ‘always have a winner’, even if a unlimited amount of players could and would loot that mob, it doesn’t guarantee that someone gets an exotic.
We are btw getting a bit off-topic here xD
Not quite off topic. We’re (or at least me) are arguing that the percentages do not stack.
Drop rates are also very subjective. There’s really no way to determine them just by what you get within a week or so of gameplay. Take a statistics course and you’ll know what I mean.
Gilosean, actually I ran the numbers before the loot drop but and higher magic find had a lower drop rate, and could not get a response from ANet about it. The loot bug exposed this even more since you get alot less loot to begin with.
Here is the general run down of what my investigation showed.
1. higher magic find lowered the drop rate by 26%
2. % drops of whites/blues/greens actually lowered
3. % drops of crafting materials and items that result in crafting materials (bags/salvagable) increased.
4. % of junk and yellow items stayed the same.
Conclussion, if you want more coin, dont use MF, if you want more crafting materials, use MF. Especially note that you have a greater chance of getting more yellow items without MF in a set time period than with MF due to the lower drop rate MF causes.
Interesting. Wouldn’t say I get generally more exotics or less exotics with or without MF gear, same with rare items. I definitely get more crafting mats with MF gear, but also more green drops and a lot less white / blue stuff.
Overall amount of drops is roughly the same, could be less with MF gear, but not noticeably so.
Nevertheless, I concur. MF gear really is only interesting if you are trying to get fine crafting materials. If you want to get gossamer scraps and the likes, I honestly wouldnt use MF gear either because of the decreased drop chance of white items.
Honestly, I quite like it how it is atm. It is not totally overpowered and must-have, but it is not totally useless either. Exactly how it should be imo. Interesting enough to try it and have some (food, booster, maybe even runes/sigil of luck), but not interesting enough to max it out (exotic mf armor, mf jewelery) and be totally useless in a group because of the missing stats.
Apophenia /æp??fi?ni?/ has been defined as the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.
The term is a misnomer incorrectly attributed to Klaus Conrad by Peter Brugger , who defined it as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”, but it has come to represent the human tendency to seek patterns in random information in general (such as with gambling), paranormal phenomena, and religion.
People take a small random sample, when talking about a 1 in 10,000 chance way to small and formulate a belif based on that experience. I got 5 drops from xxx last night is simply a random occurence it is not proof of MF doing any thing.
Farm the same mob in the same spot for a few months then take of your MF gear and repeat, or just equip + crit gear instead kill things quicker and get more loot
Right now with DR and the loot problems (bug or not not sure) one must have a MF rating of 250% or higher to see any rares at all.
What does this mean?
You have to have without a doubt mf on every piece of armor and weapons (dual wield prefered), sigil of luck on one of the weapons and completely charged, food with 30% mf, guild buffs (both of them) and then you’ll just be at 250% from what i’ve calculated on mine.
If you want to go higher (I haven’t found another solution yet) you absolutely must have the booster from the store which is entirely too expensive imo for a 1 hour booster item.
There are no potions that fill the gap between 250% nor are there foods that I’m aware of that go above 30% mf.
So pretty much you’re stuck.
I get 0 rares unless it’s at 250% and then I only get like 2 a week if anything out of 4-5 hour farming runs.
Apophenia /æp??fi?ni?/ has been defined as the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.
The term is a misnomer incorrectly attributed to Klaus Conrad by Peter Brugger , who defined it as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”, but it has come to represent the human tendency to seek patterns in random information in general (such as with gambling), paranormal phenomena, and religion.
People take a small random sample, when talking about a 1 in 10,000 chance way to small and formulate a belif based on that experience. I got 5 drops from xxx last night is simply a random occurence it is not proof of MF doing any thing.
Farm the same mob in the same spot for a few months then take of your MF gear and repeat, or just equip + crit gear instead kill things quicker and get more loot
That would be a great explanation if we didn’t already know from the experience with the unid dyes that they already ARE manipulating the drop rates of items, and that before this “fix” loot was coming in just fine and people were actually receiving rewards for their time with mf on.
