Guild Wars 2

Does investing in; or pursuing increasing your magic find actually impact your drops? I’ve heard of some people having over 200% magic find, and my question is has anyone tested this? or noticed whether or not magic find has increased the rate of collecting more rare items?

I seem to have the worst luck, and maybe out of 100 dungeon runs i get 1 exotic (I don’t know if this is normal) – so I’m wondering if getting a bunch of essences of luck and increasing MF would help my rates at all. With that being said what is the maximum account wide magic find not including any buffs/food?

I’ve noticed a significant different in high levels zones with magic find on. I at least get rares a lot more often than I used to.

Magic find improves your drops, that’s the whole point, but making a difference is hard to measure. Luck increases very slowly, and a few percentage points makes a negligible difference, so you’re not really going to notice a change. Even if your results are substantially better your mind will have been gradually adapted to that as the new normal instead of a sudden realization that drops are better. Rare items are still rare, and RNG being what it is two people can try testing but have particularly lucky/unlucky streams that seem to contradict their MF.

That said, I would consider it worth it, at least in the sense of salvaging blues and greens instead of selling them. While it seems contradictory to raise your chances of getting items just to spend more money on salvaging them, you’re also raising your chances of things you want for their value, and will eventually hit the cap and be able to fully enjoy the fruits of your MF. As for whether assorted boost items are worth it, that’s more up to you and your resources. For example, doubling your MF would make an item with a 1% chance of dropping, grow to 2%. It makes a difference, but you’re not going to be rolling in exotics, and how much boost you want to go out of your way for is your choice.

The maximum account MF is +300%, I believe. However, I don’t know how the occasional boosts from achievement points stack with the bonus from luck, and whether the AP bonuses are wasted after reaching 300% or if they stack separately.

Alchemist.3692:

Does investing in; or pursuing increasing your magic find actually impact your drops? I’ve heard of some people having over 200% magic find, and my question is has anyone tested this? or noticed whether or not magic find has increased the rate of collecting more rare items?

In my experience, it makes a difference. I ran Magic Find gear before the change to account-wide Magic Find and currently have a Magic Find over 100% and I don’t see that many common items and quote a few rares and quite a few exotics. I’ve gotten two ascended drops in WvW recently. Sadly, no precursor yet. Note that there are Magic Find boosters, Magic Find food, and Magic Find guild boosters so you can probably temporarily push your Magic Find over 100% for an hour, which should be your target, to test it out yourself. At 100%, your bonus won’t ever get lost in rounding or dropping fractions.

I think it is worth it if you buy blue and green cheaply and raise it. because you won’t really spend much money anyway.

probably not worth it to buy ectos and salvage, because it is very very expensive.

ExtraCosmic.9082:

The maximum account MF is +300%, I believe. However, I don’t know how the occasional boosts from achievement points stack with the bonus from luck, and whether the AP bonuses are wasted after reaching 300% or if they stack separately.

Before the change to account-based MF, I ran MF gear and during the Southsun Cove event where you could get a +200% boost, with my gear, other boosters, and food, I could push my MF over 400%. It also seems to affect material drops as well as equipment. You can squeeze over 100% out of the amulet infusion (20%), food(30%), and a Magic Find booster (50%) and there are other boosts, including the 100% birthday booster.

Putting aside the anecdotal confirmation bias that the Magic Find question usually draws out of people: yes, it helps. You could have just googled it and found a bunch of threads here and other places that demonstrate the difference in MF %.

dace.8019:

Putting aside the anecdotal confirmation bias that the Magic Find question usually draws out of people: yes, it helps. You could have just googled it and found a bunch of threads here and other places that demonstrate the difference in MF %.

I think the obvious is you do get more yellow or green items over white and blue.

I’m not sure how much difference it makes on gathering say T6 materials.

I think it is worth to raise magic find to a certain extend. say 150~180. since you can do it easily. Anything over that, you can just slowly buy blue and green to salvage from the TP.

Yes, but to what extent really seems to depend on where you’re playing.

In my experience with 200%+ MF, if you’re doing sub 80 content (including most of the dungeons) it’s not especially noticeable. If you’re in lvl 80 zones though it becomes more frequently noticeable with rares dropping (at this point I still pretty much only get exotics from champ bags which aren’t affected by MF so don’t expect to see them dropping like candy)

Having said that with the amount of luck required to get to the 200% to 300% range (if not doing it by boosters/banners/food/etc) unless you’re doing it at a profit (ie salvaging things who’s mats are more valuable) you’re probably better off just saving gold unless you’re thinking very very long term and plan to be playing for the next 5 to 10 years because the increase in better drops vs the cost requirement is going to take an extremely long time to pay itself off.

Protoavis.9107:

Yes, but to what extent really seems to depend on where you’re playing.

In my experience with 200%+ MF, if you’re doing sub 80 content (including most of the dungeons) it’s not especially noticeable. If you’re in lvl 80 zones though it becomes more frequently noticeable with rares dropping (at this point I still pretty much only get exotics from champ bags which aren’t affected by MF so don’t expect to see them dropping like candy)

Having said that with the amount of luck required to get to the 200% to 300% range (if not doing it by boosters/banners/food/etc) unless you’re doing it at a profit (ie salvaging things who’s mats are more valuable) you’re probably better off just saving gold unless you’re thinking very very long term and plan to be playing for the next 5 to 10 years because the increase in better drops vs the cost requirement is going to take an extremely long time to pay itself off.

What would you say its a more decent level to get to MF before the Luck required becomes stupidly insane , ive heard above 200% something you require like 30k luck for 1% O.O!

you think there is a point in the MF account based luck need that is enough to buy from tp and salvage or the ones dropped from mobs stop salvage it and sell em…or is it worth it all the way to 300% o.o?

pd: currently at 102 % ;D without buffs

Nor.2057:

Protoavis.9107:

Yes, but to what extent really seems to depend on where you’re playing.

In my experience with 200%+ MF, if you’re doing sub 80 content (including most of the dungeons) it’s not especially noticeable. If you’re in lvl 80 zones though it becomes more frequently noticeable with rares dropping (at this point I still pretty much only get exotics from champ bags which aren’t affected by MF so don’t expect to see them dropping like candy)

Having said that with the amount of luck required to get to the 200% to 300% range (if not doing it by boosters/banners/food/etc) unless you’re doing it at a profit (ie salvaging things who’s mats are more valuable) you’re probably better off just saving gold unless you’re thinking very very long term and plan to be playing for the next 5 to 10 years because the increase in better drops vs the cost requirement is going to take an extremely long time to pay itself off.

What would you say its a more decent level to get to MF before the Luck required becomes stupidly insane , ive heard above 200% something you require like 30k luck for 1% O.O!

you think there is a point in the MF account based luck need that is enough to buy from tp and salvage or the ones dropped from mobs stop salvage it and sell em…or is it worth it all the way to 300% o.o?

pd: currently at 102 % ;D without buffs

I leveled it all the way to 280. It is quite easy to just buy cheap greens and blues to level it. you just need to spend a good hour or 2 everyday buying and salvaging everyday, and in a couple of month you’ll be 280.

There is also the ecto way, much faster but it’ll cost you a fortune.

At 150 MF my drops don’t seem any better than before the MF changes. I still get 1-2 rares a week and if I’m lucky I’ll get an exotic every 2-3 weeks.

ExtraCosmic pretty much covered what I was going to say about perception. +1

I will just say that I think it’s absolutely worth it if you do a lot of event farming (e.g. stuff where you’re killing a lot of high level mobs in large numbers). That’s where you’re really going to see the benefits, in my experience.

ExtraCosmic.9082:

Magic find improves your drops, that’s the whole point, but making a difference is hard to measure. Luck increases very slowly, and a few percentage points makes a negligible difference, so you’re not really going to notice a change. Even if your results are substantially better your mind will have been gradually adapted to that as the new normal instead of a sudden realization that drops are better. Rare items are still rare, and RNG being what it is two people can try testing but have particularly lucky/unlucky streams that seem to contradict their MF.

That said, I would consider it worth it, at least in the sense of salvaging blues and greens instead of selling them. While it seems contradictory to raise your chances of getting items just to spend more money on salvaging them, you’re also raising your chances of things you want for their value, and will eventually hit the cap and be able to fully enjoy the fruits of your MF. As for whether assorted boost items are worth it, that’s more up to you and your resources. For example, doubling your MF would make an item with a 1% chance of dropping, grow to 2%. It makes a difference, but you’re not going to be rolling in exotics, and how much boost you want to go out of your way for is your choice.

The maximum account MF is +300%, I believe. However, I don’t know how the occasional boosts from achievement points stack with the bonus from luck, and whether the AP bonuses are wasted after reaching 300% or if they stack separately.

I believe the total my you can have is around 565% from boosters. But you can only have 300% as a permanent bonus.

Just be aware that it does not apply where your chances of good items are highest, I.e. Boss boxes, champion bags, …
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magic_Find
" Magic Find is both an account bonus and a character attribute that increases the chance to receive higher-quality loot from slain foes and from structured PvP reward track loot boxes. It does not affect any other containers (including champion loot bags), any chests, or any other source of loot."

So it’s most effective (and noticeable) if you slay masses of enemies, be it mobs in Orr or Zergs in WvW/EotM. But it has (nearly) no effect if you do things like world boss hunting or dungeons (without slaying the minions), where you get your loot mainly from chests/boxes/bags.

I never had any significant magic find at all back in the days when it was a stat found on equipment, because I preferred ‘real’ stats. When it became an account stat, I raised it to a little above 180% in very little time as a side effect of buying up cheap greens to salvage.

Going from almost nothing to 180+ overnight, I found that my drops significantly improved. Improvement will be pretty hard to discern if you play with a slowly increasing percentage though.

Have been salvaging all loot greens and blues for luck essence since this option was introduced.
My magic find is now 120%

Have to say i notice no difference at all.
But, i do mainly do dailies and other things in non lvl 80 zones though.

I’m in the 110s and I have notice a shift in quality (color) of what gets dropped.

But you can do this by salvaging blues and greens. Buying stuff to salvage for luck? No.

No, it is not worth it.
I have 120% magic find. With a birthday booster and omnoberry foods I lifted my MF% to 260%. The cap for MF% is 300%, so I was not too far off. For the 24 hours of game play I spend half in PvP/25% in open world and living sotry and 25% in dungeons and fractals.

In PvP I got 2 x rares and 5 t6 mats.
In living world I got 2 low tier rares worth 6-9 silver each
In fractals/dungeons I got the worst drops I have ever received.

However after resetting zones multiple times and making sure no diminishing returns were in effect after my boosters had expired I still received on par the same drops.

Ergo, it is better to sell items you don’t want than salvage them for luck essences.

MFis a good idea, but not very implemented because even if you boost by 20% or 50% or even a 100%..or all three, it only results in you receiving 1 or 2 extra items. If these rares are what you’re truly after, then world boss training will guarantee you a rare and MF remains the wild card over the assured way of farming.

No it’s not worth it. Just spam click on the essences of luck so they go away.

People that buy things just to raise their magic find are hopeless dreamers ^^

P.S. – I’m at 195% magic find from only salvaging loot that I get, everything I get is still trash that I salvage without caring.

Purple Miku.7032:

No it’s not worth it. Just spam click on the essences of luck so they go away.

People that buy things just to raise their magic find are hopeless dreamers ^^

Except most people don’t spend any gold, infact some even make gold when raising their magic find.

All you need to do is place cheap buy order on cheap blues and greens, and you can raise your magic find barely spending any gold, even profit from it.

laokoko.7403:

Purple Miku.7032:

No it’s not worth it. Just spam click on the essences of luck so they go away.

People that buy things just to raise their magic find are hopeless dreamers ^^

Except most people don’t spend any gold, infact some even make gold when raising their magic find.

All you need to do is place cheap buy order on cheap blues and greens, and you can raise your magic find barely spending any gold, even profit from it.

You’re missing the point. Magic find is not worth the time to spend raising it, as it happens on its own from just playing, as everything that is dropped is just trash to salvage except exotics (even those are trash most of the time).

The time spent buying items, salvaging them, and spam clicking on the essences/crafting them and then spam clicking them is futile as the stat itself is just RNG.

It’s definitely worth the investment, if you play a lot and generate a lot of drops from foe deaths.

Before magic find was account wide, it was easy to test what MF did. People who did controlled tests between 0% MF and 200% MF found:

• The number of drops were about the same. The high-MF results had a bit more.
• The quality of the drops was different, but not extremely so. High-MF meant more greens+rares (with very few rares) and a lot less whites+blues. There were more higher tier mats that dropped.

So having higher MF doesn’t mean you’ll be tons richer after a few events. It does mean that, over the long haul, you’ll get better loot. Or to put it as a rule of thumb:

• If you hardly play or tend to kill very few things, high MF won’t help that much and probably isn’t worth your time.
• If you play a lot and/or tend to do a lot of events with high-foe counts, then more MF will help a lot.

its not worth – magic find in this game is not as good as in other games cause most loot in gw2 is behind some chests or bags and on this magicfind dont work

mf works only on pure mob drops – but arenanet did work kitten making farming mobs waste of time

you get some better loot on temple events or on trashmobs in dungeons/fraktals but when you calculate how much gold you would need to bring your account to 300% than its a waste^^

bye

uff what is a waste and what not?

at least all this whole MF thing have increased the value of greens and blues around tp…to bad it is a pain at least to me to put all those items to sell on tp :/

so i sometimes just salvage em and if i really need some gold at that moment sell em to npc :x

the buy order cheap doesn’t sound to crazy i guess

Nor.2057:

uff what is a waste and what not?

It’s clearly a waste, iff (mean value over millions of hours)

The the worth of stuff you get out of boxes (where MF doesn’t work) per hour is higher than the worth of stuff you get directly from mobs with highest possible MF.

And probably Romek is right. The things you get out of boxes are much better than the things you get directly from mobs.

There is only one reason for MF: The thing you LIKE to do involves killing many enemies, e.g. Zerg-farming in WvW/EotM.

If the thing you like most is optimize your earnings, then you do not need MF.

I am a walking contradiction to magic find. my account m.f. is at 82% and I have naturally bad luck in games. So while I do occasionally get a good drop, It doesn’t feel like it’s getting any more frequently.

While I do not know if the actually have an impact, I do think this was the worst stat ever put into a game. I really do not see why on earth you would want to have such a stat. And the issues before account wide MF made it more then clear that ANet realised their mistake, way to late though, as it should have never made it past scrutiny.

No.

It is absolutely worth it. Anyone who says otherwise just doesn’t understand how it works.

Maybe Vol will stop by this thread and show you. He’s done extensive testing and farming.

Just salvage any “junk” you get, and let MF rise on its own. Often the mats you get this way are more useful to you than the junk items, anyway.

Each of my characters carries an invisible bag, and I dump any luck essences into it. Any I get after that then go to the same spot automatically. When I hit the bank, I dump them into there, and when those stacks look big I craft them down to the 200 luck items and consume those.

Also, if you have a character with an open crafting spot, you might as well make them an artificer. You can get to 25 skill from crafting the luck essences. It’s not much, but why waste free EXP?

It’s worth it if you are doing dungeons, fractals and event farming. Champs and LS meta stuff? Not so much because all you get are boxes and they are unaffected by MF. If you PvP a lot, then MF is good because the boxes there are affected by MF. Just depends really on what you like to do.

Magic find doesn’t magically turn all your drops into rares; it increases the overall value of your drops (from foes) slightly.

Most people won’t notice the difference, because

• You increase MF slowly, over long periods of time and +1% won’t be noticeable unless you’re recording every drop.
• Even the difference between 0% and 200% is subtle, unless you are keeping track.

So, again, the rule of thumb is:

• It will matter a lot if you tend to kill lots of things, typical for event chains.
• It won’t matter that much if you tend to focus on just a few things, typical for speed clearing dungeons.

It is NOT worth it.
Magic find is a gold sink (for a few players : those willing to quickly upgrade it), nothing more.

I’m running a base 232% + birthday booster + guild boost + banners + food = 402% magic find in EotM for hours (with really a lot of bags grabbed on the ground, filling frequently my whole inventory), i just don’t drop anything : lot of whites, a few blues, some greens, a few golds, that’s all.

I currently have 250% base magic find (count achievements), I wear 20% magic find on my amulet, and I have 10% magic find guild buff on at all times (280% at all times). I gain 1 level (at 30,000 luck cap per level) at least every one to two days. Sometimes I can manage 3 levels in a day (90,000+ luck). I also always have magic find food for dungeon runs pushing me over 300%, and I am getting rares pretty frequently. Sometimes as much as 1 per path, but atleast 1 per 3 paths of a dungeon. I also get usually about 1 exotic per day, and as much az 5 in a day now (12 hour day of gaming).

Is it worth it??? If you go about gaining magic find the right way, its definitely worth it! Trust me, there is ways of making magic find work for you.

You can get from magic find level 0 to 100 in 24 hours. Up to 150 in a week. Took me almost 3 months now to get up to 250… So it gets much harder as time goes on. But I’m not on everyday too.

I only get luck because salvaging (and getting mats/luck) is faster than vendoring/tping the items which slows you down if you have a good farm going. I find this practice to grow your MF naturally. I only have 100, so no rush. Rare items tend to show up a bit more, but the thing is most of the good stuff comes from boxes.

I personally spend time going around to known chest locations gathering greens and blues to salvage to increase MF the boosts certainly help. I’d not bother though if you have one of those accounts that tend to have a permanent DR turned on as we’ve often seen. This has happened to me as well where DR just switches on and doesn’t go anywhere for weeks or even months no matter the activity or in game location.

It really depends on what you do ingame, if you run Dungeons and Fractals or do sPvP you will not see any great impact,

If you farm high end zones, ( Dry Top, Cursed Shore, or run WvW/EotM ) then you will see better results.

I maxed my MF at 300% about 6 months ago, and in Cursed Shore I get a lot more T5/6 Mats than before, and where people do stay your rares etc are more you are still subject to that broken RnG mechanic sadly, I have seen days where I farm Cursed Shore and get no rares, and very little T6 mats, and others where I walk out with 40+ T6 and 15+ rares,

The only thing I will say is, if you are expecting to max it out and see exoitcs dropping all over the place, you will be disappointed.

And I agree that hopefully Vol will drop in, as he has done some extensive farming and I believe also has max or nearly max MF.

Ok I Did It.2854:

It really depends on what you do ingame, if you run Dungeons and Fractals or do sPvP you will not see any great impact,

If you farm high end zones, ( Dry Top, Cursed Shore, or run WvW/EotM ) then you will see better results.

I maxed my MF at 300% about 6 months ago, and in Cursed Shore I get a lot more T5/6 Mats than before, and where people do stay your rares etc are more you are still subject to that broken RnG mechanic sadly, I have seen days where I farm Cursed Shore and get no rares, and very little T6 mats, and others where I walk out with 40+ T6 and 15+ rares,

The only thing I will say is, if you are expecting to max it out and see exoitcs dropping all over the place, you will be disappointed.

And I agree that hopefully Vol will drop in, as he has done some extensive farming and I believe also has max or nearly max MF.

This is exactly my experience with capped MF. I have also had it at 300% since a month after it went account bound.

You will notice the T6 mats drop often in high level zone and rares are very streaky. It is either a few a night of farming or like 40+. It is like MF is either turned off or on for some farming days or just a strange way of programming for diminished returns.

MF does not affect Exotic drops imo. Even farming cursed shore with my boosters I was at 552% for a 24 hour total period and made sure to only do temples/events then log out when it died down. I got i think one exotic in that period with non stop killing of mobs.

I also got Dawn in wvw the week I capped my mf, but no precursors since. Man I was so excited to have took the time to cap it after that drop but now so dissapointed many months later.

I think you have nothing to lsoe,you’ll eventually get your money back,because when you salvage you get mats and you can sell the mats to get some money or use them when crafting.

And you will also have a higher passive magic find,like…you will be playing normally like you always do,but with a higher chance to get rare drops,IMO it is a win/win situation.

PS: But only if you salvage only drops,don’t waste your gold buying masterwork items from TP just to salvage them.
PS²: Lets summon Vol in this thread!

I have 300% magic find. Im about 6% short of the max (I think). I rushed the 295% when the magic find rework came in by mass purchases on the TP of blues, greens and globs and had it about two weeks in. Prior to the rework I had a warrior running around 250% MF for spot farming (IE lodestone farming etc). I don’t really notice the difference to be honest. I think overall I don’t really feel the difference since alot of the major loot in the game these days is from chests, which are not effected by Magic Find.

My personal experience is that, yes, there IS a noticeable difference. I will typically get at least 1 or 2 Rares a day now just by killing random mobs. Exotics are still few and far between, but the daily Rare(s) is something that I wasn’t getting back when I only had < 50% MF. (I’m now up to 170+).

SRG.3607:

It is NOT worth it.
Magic find is a gold sink (for a few players : those willing to quickly upgrade it), nothing more.

I’m running a base 232% + birthday booster + guild boost + banners + food = 402% magic find in EotM for hours (with really a lot of bags grabbed on the ground, filling frequently my whole inventory), i just don’t drop anything : lot of whites, a few blues, some greens, a few golds, that’s all.

It’s “magic find” not “miraculous find” — you are still going to get whites, blues, and greens. You are, however, getting more greens (and rares) than if you had 0% MF.

The thing is it is not hard to raise magic find at all. Just place a bunch of buy orders on cheap blue and green everyday and salvage it. You probably even make money from it.

Even if you’re not gaining much, you won’t be investing much.

Seen one place that suggests on average blue give you 11 EoL, green 30 EoL and cracking an ecto from a rare or exotic salvage gives 110 EoL.

Anet’s moving more and more towards giving rewards as chests (things like champ boxes and event chests on the bottom right of your screen). Chests are not affected by magic find. Coincidence? Not sure.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Anet’s moving more and more towards giving rewards as chests (things like champ boxes and event chests on the bottom right of your screen). Chests are not affected by magic find. Coincidence? Not sure.

It’s funny, really. By making MF account bound, they gave people more reason to fight everything that crosses their paths. Less skipping and bypassing of challenges is a good thing, right?

But then, they start to give out more and more rewards in a way that MF doesn’t affect. One step forward, and then a bullet through their own foot for daring to step out of line.

Imo, i didnt feel the effect of magic find until i reached around 200% base. From 0-150% + i didnt feel any changes at all. Then i boosted my magic find to 300% by using globs of ectos and selling the dusts i get from them and buying again.

300% is exactly like 200% once again i didnt notice any significant change at all.

So for others, it would be best to just stay at around 200-220% as it is the number that will make you notice the difference.

Magic find is totally worth it. My chance at a pre-cursor has went up from 0.0000000% to 0.000000%

Magic Find is more of a long term investment. It’s not something you’ll see in a few hours or days, but rather weeks and months. So is MF worth it? Yes, in the long run.