Guild Wars 2

I have heard conflicting opinions of MF, ranging from it’s vital, to it’s useless, and so…

The plan: To test out MF to see just how much it changed the kind of drops I could get.

The method: All tests were carried out in the north of Frostgorge. I killed 150 normal mobs, and 25 Veterans without any MF at all. I then did the same amount with as close to 150% MF as I could get. After every 50 enemies I would go to another zone or log out for a while, to try and stave off DR. I kept a complete record of drops.

The results: There was a noticable increase in both the amount and quality of drops. Specific things I took note of -

White/Blue equipment and T5 crafting materials increased in frequency, but not by a large amount.

T6 crafting materials found were almost doubled. Though, that usually meant it went from 2 drops to 4, still not great.

I saw an increase of Black Lion chests and Unidentified Dye with MF.

The amount of Green tier equipment was the most noticable change using MF, and it dropped mainly from the vets I killed.

In all those kills, I found only one Yellow. I was using MF and it came from a Veteran.

There was an increase in money found, BUT, it can be accounted for almost entirely from the bonus from the Omnonberry Bar, leaving me to believe MF on it’s own doesn’t have much change on the amount of money found.

Final Thoughts: So, of course this may not be entirely accurate. RNG is a big factor, and it could be said I needed a bigger amount of kills, but with about eight seperate sessions of killing, and the four of those with MF giving similar results, I think it may not be far off.

Something to take into account, is that in my MF gear, killing took a much longer time. Not so noticable on just a few mobs, but with the large scale of killing I did, it really added up. With this in mind, I think MF gear is great if you’re part of a zerg in orr and only need to tag mobs to get drops. Events with large amounts of veterans, such as dragon fights, are probably also worth doing in MF gear. Solo, it’s probably better to gear up and get in more kills.

disagree, have u tried farming pre-nerf? with or without MF% is a big and noticeable difference as much to be said; MF% affects your standing on the loot table
killing a mob much quicker does not resonate to you being on the upper end of these thable it just re-balances u on “random”

What the hell does prenerf matter for? We’re talking here and now, not patches ago which don’t even matter now anyways. Thanks OP for running the test and i tend to agree for the most part. In zergs, i think MF set is nice since it can only help, altho solo i still wear it regardless.

@Gnatoay

Yes, but my point is that perhaps, when talking about normal mobs at least, it’s better to kill more mobs, more quickly, to get more chances at drops. The MF gear gives you slightly better chances, but a lot less of them (solo killing at least).

If you’re killing stuff as a part of a group, or hunting Veterans/Champions/Mobs with a seemingly better chance of dropping rares and up, then it’s different.

Good info, Valmarius.

I know MF doesn’t work on chests, but does it work on nodes and loot bags?

200 mobs is not even in the realm of a test. The RNG can and will account for all of that.

I’ve gotten more than you list without MF farming Orr events.

@Xaaz

It was 350 mobs, actually, but I agree that it’s a rather small number to be 100% sure of anything. I would like to point out though that the mobs in Orr will quite possibly have a different drop rate than the mobs I farmed, and that you will tend to kill a lot of vets and champions there.

If I get time/willpower, I might repeat my test in Orr.

@Karizee

Personally, I haven’t noticed any changes while opening loot bags or nodes. That’s just opinion, though, I haven’t paid too much attention to it.

I play both a warrior with zero mf and a necro with full mf gear, and the difference is obvious. As much in how much faster the necro make gold once he sell all the crap he drop, but also when i do dungeons or get in any tricky situation and see why the warrior have like 2k more stat points. Necro have wonderful survivability mechanism so it make up a bit, but still the difference is obvious. I personally think they should have made a special room for the mf stat in the character sheet.

I usually farm with non MF wearing people and as far as mats I find we pull in roughly the same amount of similarly tiered items.

What I DO find is in my 70% MF kit on I get better equipment drops than they do. That’s not to say that I don’t get a whole ton of blues and greens and even whites, I do. But now and then I get a yellow or even sometimes an orange when they’re still getting greens.

This, coupled with the updates effects on randomizing nodes so sometimes they give a heck of a lot more than they used to, seems to have made farming a lot easier rather then harder lately. At least for me.

Valmarius.4150:

@Xaaz

It was 350 mobs, actually, but I agree that it’s a rather small number to be 100% sure of anything. I would like to point out though that the mobs in Orr will quite possibly have a different drop rate than the mobs I farmed, and that you will tend to kill a lot of vets and champions there.

If I get time/willpower, I might repeat my test in Orr.

I really didn’t mean to be harsh and I hope more people do test MF. I guess I’m just sceptical of the entire premise of MF. I have an MF set which gets me close to 170ish MF and to be quite honest I never even put it on any more. I get much more loot without it and my kill speed is faster due to higher stats.

Again, personal observation. I would rather see them up the drop rates a few % and remove this entire MF nonsense.

I mean in order to get any significant results requires a large sampling size… and given the nature of MF it’s natural that in a law of big numbers type situation MF wins in the long run. The question shouldn’t be whether MF is useful or not but rather over what time/kill frame does the gap between using mf and not using it become noticeable?

Karizee.8076:

Good info, Valmarius.

I know MF doesn’t work on chests, but does it work on nodes and loot bags?

See that’s part of the problem for me.

If they are going to have a stat like this, make it work on everything.

They have the means to detect bots with pattern recognition. So they are basically taking those out one by one. They are working on detecting crazy teleportation routines.

So why not stop harming the public and actually let mf work on everything?

Why have it in the game at all if it’s not a magical means of increasing the luck of finding rare items or moneys on everything? It’s ridiculous.

It’s like having a magical stat called killemdead and the higher the percentage of killemdead you have the faster you kill enemies, BUT not the trolls, and only in this one zone nowhere else, and not the veteran trolls, and only on tuesdays when you have a blindfold on and you successfully rub your belly while patting your head.

See where I’m going with this. Just let the players do our thing, it’s really not that difficult to allow people to play the game the way it was originally intended the more they fenagle with the stats and how they work the worse it gets. Just look at condition builds. Bleeding and poison are nowhere near what burning is all because people complained in the forums about thieves and rangers in pvp, now everyone accept for guardians are forced to use pow prec %crit damage armor weapons and builds because they played around with the numbers when they should have left them alone and worked on bigger problems like fixing the miss issues.

/soapbox

tigirius.9014:

So why not stop harming the public and actually let mf work on everything?

/soapbox

MF on chests is terrible because it introduces the tedium of switching to MF gear just for opening chests.