Guild Wars 2

I know everyone’s been saying it doesn’t affect chests. But whenever I do World Bosses, I rarely ever get rares. I’ve tested two times now with 200+ Magic Find with boosters, and both times I got 2-4 rares in chests. Yet without boosters I have around 110 and don’t get that many rares ever from chests.

maniamsmart.7981:

I know everyone’s been saying it doesn’t affect chests. But whenever I do World Bosses, I rarely ever get rares. I’ve tested two times now with 200+ Magic Find with boosters, and both times I got 2-4 rares in chests. Yet without boosters I have around 110 and don’t get that many rares ever from chests.

One is happenstance
Twice is coincidence
3 times is enemy action.

So far you’ve done it twice. That’s coincidence. (And RNG is still RNG).

I also find that I tend to get better drops (more yellow, less blue/green) when running WB’s at higher magic find.

According to Isaiah Cartwright, Magic Find only affects creature kills and doesn’t affect boss chests.

It’s possible that has changed in the past two years, but it’s unlikely (though also possible) ArenaNet wouldn’t have told us if that’s the case.

If you’re up for some science (“Science!”), you could try sampling enough world bosses with and without magic find bonuses to see if a clear trend emerges.

Not sure how many that would be, but I’m guessing it would be a lot more than two.

Magic find only affects DIRECT drops from monsters, some bosses are champions and thus have a champ box, direct drop, and world boss chest and bonus chest.
For those bosses it is possible to get 2 rare+ grade items without opening a single chest/box. All humanoid bosses are champs (maw, megaD, Taidha, Ulgoth) and have direct drops, all other world bosses do not have direct drops and are not champs.
Also prior to the world boss health/crit changes, only the humanoid bosses could be crit, now all the bosses can but only in very specific locations that aren’t possible for ranged characters but whatever…

Anyway, if you want your magic find to affect chests, go to pvp, those chests are affected by your magic find stat.

The moral of the story is that RNG doesn’t care about you no matter how much magic find you feed it. It’s an unrewarding one way relationship.

There was a 6 week period where, by happenstance, I was increasing the account-wide MF from Luck about twice a week. For the 4 hours after that happened, I got exceptional drops compared to what I was used to (e.g. an exotic in 3 of 4 fractal chests, versus my usual of not even a rare).

Eventually, I got to feeling that it was status quo, so I started salvaging a few ecto, whenever I was close to a +1% increase. I started joking about it to friends.

Then, of course, RNG being RNG, I stopped getting great drops after a MF increase and just got the usual blues from dungeons, greens from fractals, rarely a rare, and never an exotic. Just like everyone else.

tl;dr We human beings are exceptionally good at spotting patterns that aren’t there.