Guild Wars 2

Me and some guildies discussed this on our IRC channel recently and they feel the same way I feel about this % of Magic Find, Gold find or any kind of “Find”.

Me and you as players. Does it really work for you? Is it more RNG? To some players I found it feels like a social status… “Oh look I have 300% Magic Find.” Then you get the guy with 5% Magic find.. “I just got a precursor from running Edge, yay!”

Is it worth spending so much time grinding to get a high percentage on any kind of “Find”?

Of course magic find works, I always run with magic find and I’ve found one (1) good item in 2000 hours plus (+) of game play.

Someone told me that ne noticed an increase in dropped rares with 500%+ MF and I have to admit: with my 2xx% MF (don’t know the exact value) I get almost no whites and more blues and greens.

Is it worth grinding for? I don’t think so. I don’t even think that MF-bufffood is worth it’s price since the increase in MF is rather low compared to the MF I already have. Also I’ve never experienced better loot when taking MF-bufffood and banners. Not even in combination with the MF-buff you get in SW after Vinewrath + Breach.

Magic Find only increases the chance to find something. So if the guy with 0% magic foind couldn’t ever get a precursor to drop, then 10000% magic find wouldn’t help either.

Magic find just increases your chances for a higher rarity for drops. Gold find isn’t a chance and ups your income from monster drops by a percentage which I think is the same for karma and exp. Then again… I see more and more mobs without any drops whatsoever.

For most of the maps magic find only works on drops from kills so unless you are doing a lot of killing it’s of no benefit and even then it may not help. It doesn’t effect champ bags, chests (except the bandit chests in the Silverwastes) or any type of container/bag except for sPvP. The only thing it seems to effect in PvE is the gear or mat type of drop from a kill. With this In mind unless you kill large numbers of mobs it may not be worth it to put a lot of effort into maxing magic find.

Precursors have such a low drop chance that having 3 times that (300% mf) isn’t going to make much of a difference.

Where I notice having more mf the most is with t5/t6 drops, blues, greens, and rares. I noticed a reasonable uptick in loot quality every +50% mf or so. It adds up as you go up in mf and the better rewards and thus better income are more noticeable over time. It’s not just oh hey I have 300% mf from luck now precursors are falling from the sky :P

Is it worth it? Depends.

What are you salvaging for your luck? Is it profitable to do so or a loss vs npc-ing or selling it on the TP?

How much do you play and how you play? If you’re mostly doing world boss events where popping the chest with 300% mf doesn’t matter then obviously not. If you’re doing dungeon runs, maybe. If you’re killing a lot of things while doing events, then probably.

If you’re not a hardcore farmer, but still play quite a bit, I would suggest getting your mf from luck up to 150%. Getting 150% mf from luck requires 11.5% of the total luck you need to get to 300% mf from luck. So for 11.5% of the effort you get 50% of the reward from the stat which isn’t bad at all.

I just maxed mine out primarily because of the time when I did it which was in between when ascended weapons and ascended armor came out. During this time cloth blues and greens were still dirt cheap and salvaging some metal armor/weapons was also very profitable. So I put in orders, saved the cloth, sold the metals, and got luck as a side product. Overall it gave me quite a bit of gold to max out my MF. It was a LOT of clicking though as you can imagine xD

If anyone is interrested there is a link in my sig for some information. While it’s quite dated by now and some bugs have been fixed (like I don’t think spcific lvl ranges of bows give metal anymore), the principals will still work.

i believe (based on the mechanics of everywhere else in the game) that MF doesn’t even affect sw chests, rather, it just multiplies drop odds based on buff stacks.
i don’t think your mf from other sources is taken into consideration even then, and for all the free mf it offers, silverwastes is awful for item finding simply because event associated mobs cannot drop loot.

I think Magic Find is meant to be earned as you go along – if you grind for find, you’re wasting some energy that could be spent on playing the game for fun. Grind for other things, don’t grind for find!

Aberrant.6749:

Precursors have such a low drop chance that having 3 times that (300% mf) isn’t going to make much of a difference.

No actually, it has a huge impact. You should get three times as many precursors (btw, 300% mf is more like 4 times the drop rate)

What you wanted to say I guess is that having 300% mf won’t be noticeable.

i think what he was trying to say is that 4x 0 is still 0.

Narrrz.7532:

i think what he was trying to say is that 4x 0 is still 0.

or rather 2×0.000001 is still basically nothing.

Think everytime you buy a lottery ticket, you now get two. Still got no chance of winning the jackpot, just better chances of winning the most basic prizes.

I 100% notice the difference. Not with Exotics necessarily, but certainly with Rares, that’s for sure.

It simply increases the ‘base’ level of loot.
MF is definitely worth investing in.

If you dont want to do endless clicking, get an articifer alt to convert luck to exotics. And find a way to get luck fast and cost effective, like trick or treat bags or salvaging stuff, if you sell the mats you recover most of your money from tot bags.

Getting it to at least 100-150% is something I would highly recommend. Over the course of your time as a player, it will pay itself off. More rares, exotics, t5/t6, cores, lodes, etc.

Maxed out Magic Find is not going to substantially increase the number of precursors. It likely won’t even have a noticeable effect on the number of exotics.

It will, however, substantially increase the number of better crafting materials you find as well reduce the number of junk items (with an offsetting increase in the number of white, blue, green, and yellow gear items).

I used to run the old Modniir chain while leveling my Magic Find %. The reduction in junk items was staggering.

With MF and RNG it is still random at best. If the drop rate for a precursor is 1% normally and your MF is 300% that just means you have a 4% chance. When you factor in how RNG is and how the lottery is, people buying 1 ticket can still win the lottery where as someone who buys 300 tickets can always lose. The only time MF really has a noticeable difference is with things that have a high base drop rate.

Also people still use IRC? Next you will tell me people still use ICQ.

300x vanishingly small number = vanishingly small number

MF is a bit like collecting for me. So far I’ve collected 101/300. I like it when I get the ding.

And if I ever find a precursor I will of course congratulate myself for collecting all the MF points required to do so :-)

~TG

SicilianDragon.3071:

It simply increases the ‘base’ level of loot.
MF is definitely worth investing in.

If you dont want to do endless clicking, get an articifer alt to convert luck to exotics. And find a way to get luck fast and cost effective, like trick or treat bags or salvaging stuff, if you sell the mats you recover most of your money from tot bags.

Getting it to at least 100-150% is something I would highly recommend. Over the course of your time as a player, it will pay itself off. More rares, exotics, t5/t6, cores, lodes, etc.

The only reason its even marginally worth the effort is because its basically 100% passive. most of the game’s reward redesigns trivialize magic find in some of the most fundamental ways of the system.

1. MF only affects raw drops. This means its only consistent benefit is in Legacy areas of Tyria (where mobs have a reasonable chance of a loot drop), but whose drop tables were always massively against the player.

2. Legacy areas have layered drop tables. Gear and mat drops are noticeably rare to begin with, with the majority of it being trash gear. But the biggest enemy I want to point out are the bag drops. On top of the fairly low chance of these being a drop, within them is another drop table with just low odds of finding something truly worth noting. How many enemies do you kill in the Arah event chain? Quite a lot…. From that it yields probably around 8-10 bags. Out of those 8-10 bags, what are the odds of getting even a T6 mat? Of that T6 mat, is it basic or fine?

This is the point where I feel the system went overboard with the layers of RNG. Because even in the unlikely event of a drop event happening, you’re still faced with a great deal of uncertainty that it may even be a pay out. So much so, that its considered a vital cost assessment on whether to sell a bag at a low, but stable return, and simply buy the desired mat; Or roll the dice, and open the bag, hoping something worthwhile drops from it.

3. Champ bags are just better in every respect. With a fairly small amount of event knowledge, or simply the ability to follow WP call outs, players can generate large amounts of champ bags. Seriously large amounts….. I can get a similar rate of champ bags (in orr) doing event farms to that of heavy moldy bags from open world farming. But unlike the moldy bags, Champ bags have guaranteed mats, a piece of gear, and very high chance common and fin T5 material, a reasonably high chance of T6 common or fine mat, and a relatively good chance of Rare mats (cores and lode stones) that is otherwise beyond rare from all other possible sources.

4. Newer area and events spawn mobs that don’t drop loot. As part of the move to the event chest reward, almost all event mobs stopped dropping loot.

5. Event reward popups ensure a reward is issued, but is just as questionable in its impact on layering drop tables even further. So while the event reward issues a minimum; underneath it can have as bad, or possibly worse potential output because of its time gating factor.

I know they wanted to move away from “farming” as the primary way of obtaining mats and rare drops. However, I honestly don’t see how issuing a guaranteed reward helps the player, when they are now being sent through several layers of RNG and drop tables to get to the same materials they were seeking via farms. The only reason champ bags have been a net gain is due to their overall reliability and frequency in obtaining.

It was obvious the champ bags were tuned to flood the market with common mats, in order to encourage crafting. But I think it still fails to see the bigger problem of how players pursue crafting, and the high degree of inefficiency with how conversions work in practice. Ascended mats highlights this problem, as mid tier mats used in the process are so lopsidedly priced due to consumption requirements(like the large need for cloth in all armors), and completely back fired by making the crafting leveling process (which is a per-requsite to ascended crafting) even more difficult to work through.

I must say… that is a very nice post with alot of good points.

FrizzFreston.5290:

Then again… I see more and more mobs without any drops whatsoever.

Yeah that kinda sucks.

I have it around 200% and I’m still not sure it was worth investing into.
If it does something it doesn’t do a lot.

For all we know maybe Anet made a mistake and it doesn’t do anything.

stof.9341:

Aberrant.6749:

Precursors have such a low drop chance that having 3 times that (300% mf) isn’t going to make much of a difference.

No actually, it has a huge impact. You should get three times as many precursors (btw, 300% mf is more like 4 times the drop rate)

What you wanted to say I guess is that having 300% mf won’t be noticeable.

Equilibriator.8741:

Narrrz.7532:

i think what he was trying to say is that 4x 0 is still 0.

or rather 2×0.000001 is still basically nothing.

Think everytime you buy a lottery ticket, you now get two. Still got no chance of winning the jackpot, just better chances of winning the most basic prizes.

Indeed. 3x diddly squat is still pretty much diddly squat.

3x t5/t6 mat drop chance is much greater. Large skulls/linen salvage item/totems are far more common off of grawl for me as well now for another example.

I have somewhat noticed better loot as my MF goes up, but not enough to farm luck for it though. I just play the game, and salvage stuff to get my luck. I have a copper-fed salv-o-matic that I use on greens and blues so it adds up. I also use the artificing skill to combine luck so i dont have to click as much. And as someone else mentioned, the Trick-or-Treat bags can give luck as well.

shimmershine.3156:

I have somewhat noticed better loot as my MF goes up, but not enough to farm luck for it though. I just play the game, and salvage stuff to get my luck. I have a copper-fed salv-o-matic that I use on greens and blues so it adds up. I also use the artificing skill to combine luck so i dont have to click as much. And as someone else mentioned, the Trick-or-Treat bags can give luck as well.

If you know the general prices of the mats you can salvage to make $ while gaining. I wouldn’t recommend just salvaging everything that drops since much of that is going to be a $ loss (like anything that gives t5/t6 leather is nearly a total loss).

I just watched shows while putting in buy orders and salvaging so it was in the background and felt like I was just watching stuff. It’s certainly not for everyone though.

I maxed out my MF at 300% along time ago, and when I first did it, the loot change was great, CS farming was rares and T6 all over the place, but that was along time ago now, the loot has been falling and or removed from some events, some events have had ALL loot removed from them, other events have been nerfed etc, to where farming in the open game is not worth the time,

Given that Anet seem to be moving away from loot from enemies and putting into chests rewards ( silverwastes for example ) and MF does not affect this,

I do notice better loot on random days in WvW when going zerg vs zerg, but its hugely RnG based, some days I can be in WvW and get 7 or 8 rares and an exotic + lots of bags in an hour, and other days I don’t get anything,

If my MF was back to 0 today I wouldn’t waste the gold to max it out, its completely not worth it, Anet have opted for the RnG style of play and don’t let anyone tell you any different.

The only thing I will agree on from this topic is that the higher your MF goes you do seem to get more blues and greens vs whites.