Guild Wars 2

Over the past few weeks I have slowly purchased a set of magic find armor.

Occasionally I see a boost in the drops received and some days I see little to no drops.

So the ultimate question, is it really worth spending on magic find?

Definately!
me farming anywhere without magic find for 2 hours will net me around 60 silver maybe and with magic find somewhere around 1 gold an hour.
But doing all the world bosses for rares nets more gold since you’re guaranteed a rare which you can salvage for ectos or outright sell on the tp.

What overall percentage was your magic find boosted? if You have say only 5% more magic find it really isn’t that noticeable.

For farming, yes. On average, you will receive more drops and it’s noticeable after a while. You can also get away with just rares, rather than exotics, for your mf set.

For dungeons, just be careful. You’re going to run at ~60% effectiveness, losing a lot of stat points that could be put toward something more useful.

well, I’m just looking at using it for farming and possible world events. Dungeons I will always run gear for my build.

Currently I’m at 132% MF only lacking the runes and earrings which would give another 74% putting the total at 206%.

Is this good? Or should I be looking at a higher number for MF?

I equipped my first Level 80 character with a Magic Find bonus of around +100%, which doubles the odds at each random table check, is immune to getting lost in rounding, and can be done without sacrificing too much of the character’s effectiveness because it can be done while still having a lot of non-Magic Find gear. Basically:

5 Superior Traveler’s Runes + 1 Superior Pirate Rune = 60% (Could be 5 Pirate and 1 Traveler’s)
1 Sygyzy Amulet + Magic Find Utility Infusion = 24%
2 Opal Rings = 14%
One other +2% or higher bonus or use the Golden Lotus instead of Sygyzy (I have a Quiver of a Thousand Arrows for +5%).

None of my armor has innate Magic Find, nor do my other accessories.

Is it worth it? I think so. I equipped my second Level 80 character without any Magic Find and took her to various events and the returns seemed to be significantly lower, so I made her a set of Magic Find armor, too. I also walked out of my second set of Fractals with a Vial of Condensed Mists Essence, which is how I built the quiver.

On the other hand, if you want to power through dungeons as quickly as possible or want to play with pick-up groups that have a problem with you wasting effectiveness for a bonus that only benefits you, then it’s probably not worth it. There are people who have problems being in a party with a character with Magic Find gear because they consider it selfish.

MF doesn’t work with chests so I absolutely detest when people use MF in dungeons. You will be doing nothing but leech and will have to be carried, so don’t do it.

Open world, sure, I tested out a full set of MF armour weapons, accessories and runes and I had a noticeable improvement in drop quality, just for the love of God don’t take your MF to dungeons.

MF is def worth it, just keep in mind that you need to use it over a long period of time to notice the difference. just tossing it on wont make you next drop an exotic but you will get more exotics over a long time of play.

Magic find is a poison of the mind.

Random = random regardless of how you analyze it.

I have seen players farm for corrupted lodestones for 3 hours and get nothing in full MF gear, and I’ve seen players farm for under 2 minutes with 0% MF and get a lodestone.

Magic find does nothing but increase your loot potential…. but guess what?

If you are sacrificing 1/3 of your usefulness and making things die 2/3 as fast, you are already ruining your chances for loot quantity.

(This of course does not matter when zerging in Cursed Shore or something)

Looted corpses per hour go down, but chances to loot better things increases.

Its an even trade…. but makes everyone around you hate you for leeching.

I am strongly against magic find (if that isn’t apparent already) and I strongly believe it does absolutely nothing except give players an excuse for wearing sub-optimal gear.

colesy.8490:

MF doesn’t work with chests so I absolutely detest when people use MF in dungeons. You will be doing nothing but leech and will have to be carried, so don’t do it.

Thats what they say, except everytime I use mf gear and loot chests I seem to get noticably better drops for some reason… except for the three dragons, they always give more crap than a random skelk accidentally falling on your sword :/

Anyway, when you are roaming the world, yes definetly worth it. You can make “cheap” 150% mf gear with yellows and probably make up for the investment within days, thats how noticable the drop rate can be, especially during zerg events.

nope
DR kicks in before you got any loot.

Ping.5739:

nope
DR kicks in before you got any loot.

DR doesn’t kick in until at least an hour (possibly much longer) of killing the same mobs over and over. I wish people would stop with unprovable conspiracy theories.

So if you’re farming for an hour, in the same area, magic find should still be worth it.

I don’t really think so. You can get the boost to MF through food, which is better IMO than sacrificing your stats.

Still, if you’ve got it, might as well use it.

Magic find does work. I have been farming sharks for armored scales extensively in southsun cove for the past 2 weeks. With all boosts, i get to 420% ,
When i started out, i only used the 200% buff from the settler and got 8-10 t6 scales per hour. With MF armor, trinkets, food etc on, i get about 25-30 t6 scales per hour.
But the amount of t5 scales i got per hour was roughly the same.
So it doesnt mean that you get more drops, just the chance that you get a rare drop instead of a common one is higher.
I also checked, if i kill more sharks per hour in my zerker gear and that is not the case.

I melt down ponds of sharks in no time with my mf build, which gives me might when hit and on critical, so i have 25 stacks after 2-3 seconds and i kill 5 sharks in 5-7 seconds. I kill roughly 400-600 mobs per hour, depending how much other people farm there. I actually spend more time out of combat looking for mobs than killing them.

It can, but it’s not a magic pill— 100% greater chance of something very small, is still very small. I think it’s simpler to focus on killing speed.

However, if you are doing dailies in a 1-15 zone, I can’t see why you wouldn’t wear MF gear since being fully geared for that is ridiculously overkill. Snagging 1-2 yellows in the time it takes do dailies is a huge boon since often going to these zones is barely break even considering wp costs. There are also other more subtle things such as crappy white items becoming crappy blue/green items which vendor for a bit more and over time it does add up. Indeed, when MF gear is on, my standard vendor trash becomes greens. On the other hand, wearing mf gear for world bosses or dungeons is usually not a good idea since you will kill too slowly.

I think all out MF is too much as well. When MF’ing, I use berserkers with 5 pirate runes and 1 traveler rune for 60 MF. Amulet adds 20 and a peach tart makes it 106 MF already. Stacking terrible explorer runes, armor, trinkets, and weapons seems like too big of a sacrifice to the point where you may lose loot due to not doing enough damage to tag. Luck sigils seem to be a terrible joke too. 15 MF for all that effort which goes away after you go down? :S

I mean 200 MF isn’t twice better than 100 MF. 100% + 100%=200%, 100% + 200% = 300%. It’s only 50% better! Sacrificing like 60% crit damage or hundreds of armor for that? Nope. I’m happy with just sacrificing 18% crit damage for 80 Mf.

For fresh 80s that have to self gear, I don’t think there’s much wrong with acquiring yellow berserker with mf orbs (later to upgrade to mf runes). You will still output okay damage until you can establish yourself with exotic whatever gear. Going full yellow explorer though was a waste of time— I felt it was just too weak.

tl;dr If you are impatient, don’t bother with MF as the effects take time and patience to show up and it’s not in the most obvious way (OMG precursor!). When in doubt, just pack zerker gear and kill as many as possible as soon as possible. That’s the more reliable path.

I would say it’s not worth it.

I made a complete magic find setup for my engineer…and I mean everything…jewelry, armor, weapons. Even threw in consumables. I don’t remember the actual boost in magic find numbers but it was obviously substantial.

I used it for about a week, when farming, and I honestly noticed no difference in my gold intake. Nothing scientific to my method mind you….it just seemed like my rate of finding loot, and the quality of the loot, was about the same as before.

Perhaps I should have tested it longer, but what I hated was how much longer it took to kill enemies. That difference was unmistakable. So I figured even if the MF gear ultimately proved itself, I hated using it too much to continue with it.

I also hated having to swap out (and carry around) a complete gearset whenever I wanted to switch from farming to other activities such as dungeons.

So I salvaged all the MF gear and moved on.

That’s why I don’t like total MF. Your killing efficiency was most likely too slow and you were unable to tag stuff.

If you want a more reliable way to make gold if you don’t like dungeons like myself, take the gold infusion + omnomnom bars. Southsun/Cursed Shore has plenty of enemies that will drop coin.

Alternatively, take karma infusion and spam Orrian boxes every now and then.

These two aren’t going to generate as spectacular effects on your loot like MF can, but are far more consistent. You also sacrifice close to nothing by doing this.

Vayne.8563:

Ping.5739:

nope
DR kicks in before you got any loot.

DR doesn’t kick in until at least an hour (possibly much longer) of killing the same mobs over and over. I wish people would stop with unprovable conspiracy theories.

So if you’re farming for an hour, in the same area, magic find should still be worth it.

I hope you are just assuming the time for DR cause you are new to the game and farming. If you are not, I will ask you for proofs.

Normally, my DR kicks in when I have stayed in the same area for more than 30 minutes. Stuff like lodestone typically won’t drop on the first hour of farming. I will get about 3 rares or T6 mats with full mf/zerker set before DR ruins it.

IMO, having a group helps more than stacking mf—killing mob faster=getting loots faster.

ArchonWing.9480:

I mean 200 MF isn’t twice better than 100 MF. 100% + 100%=200%, 100% + 200% = 300%. It’s only 50% better! Sacrificing like 60% crit damage or hundreds of armor for that? Nope. I’m happy with just sacrificing 18% crit damage for 80 Mf.

This assumes you had 60% crit damage to loose to begin with…

On my Mesmer I only have a mostly PvT and MF set, the damage difference between the two are minor . Survivability is far lower on the MF set (some mobs actually hurt me!) but that doesnt really matter when running in open PvE.

So swapping to MF and loosing effectivness really depends on what kind of gear you normally run with. If you move from full exotic/ascended berserkerderper to crap quality MF, then sure its going to be noticable in terms of damage.

See signature

but MF is not worth it anymore. It was worth it before.