Guild Wars 2

Reading through sites on google, including the official wiki, I’m finding that MF increases quality of a specific drop. However, my guildies and guild leader insist that it was patched a while ago to affect only drop frequency, not quality. Which is correct? Tried searching for Magic Find on forums and got over 3k results I really didn’t want to sort through.

As far as I know its quality, NOT frequency. I think a dev confirmed that a while back.

If it was changed in a patch I missed it.

It improves the frequency of receiving items of rarer quality.

Magic find works by increasing your chances of finding an item of a higher rarity. Take the following example:

You kill a monster. The monster has the following “loot table”, like rolling dice:
1-80 to drop nothing
81-90 to drop white
91-100 to drop blue/green/rare/exotic

Let’s say you have 100% magic find. Now, instead of rolling 91-100 to drop blue/green/rare/exotic, you would get the magic item on a roll of 81-100.

Of course, this example is using imaginary numbers just for edification. I bet that the loot tables in the game are far different, probably with much lower chances for most creatures to drop items. So, you might be doubling a roll of 1 (for a rare) to a 1-2 with 100% magic find.

AntiGw.9367:

It improves the frequency of receiving items of rarer quality.

I see what you did there.