The fundamental problem with magic find is that it is never about the playstyle of your character, unlike every other stat. Every other stat is about how you want your character to fight. Magic find is just making your character weaker to get more stuff.
I would have no problem with magic find if it did not take the place of another stat, and was instead just an extra perk occupying its own slot, but in every game where I have seen it on equipment, taking the place of another stat is exactly what it does.
As for people who are saying that taking it away isn’t fair to people that want it, it is completely arbitrary, as drop rates can literally be adjusted to anything the devs want. Again, that is a separate issue from balancing damage, which has a clear impact on the difficulty (that is not to be read as “time invested”) on the game.
I know that bringing up Diablo III is always a mistake but…I said for the longest time that Diablo III should not have magic find gear, and people argued with me and argued with me about it on some other forums. A few short months after launch, Blizzard turned around and decided that magic find is not a good stat to have on gear. Good reasons for not having magic find on gear (taking the place of another stat) include:
1. It encourages doing weird things like gear swapping just for the magic find boost, so then other arbitrary systems are layered on top of that, as it is seen as against the spirit of how it’s supposed to work. I know this is technically not possible to do with Guild Wars 2 mechanics in the first place (except for swapping between your two weapon sets), but it still pretty well illustrates how dumb it is.
2. It creates the stupid dynamic where the game mechanics directly incentivize bringing sub-optimal (for combat) gear.
3. It is a stat that, depending on your goal (not your playstyle, or your build, but your goal in playing) is either going to be favored over everything else, or useless. There’s really no middle ground with it. A player either aims to maximize their magic find or they don’t care about it. People can theorycraft about it all day, but that’s what actual player behavior always ends up being. I also mentioned this above, but this really is a critical point which some people seem to disregard: Every other stat is about playstyle and character build. Magic find is about rewards.
4. The whole goal of magic find gear is to get gear besides the magic find gear itself, which is kind of stupid for a variety of reasons.
At the end of the day, there’s really little of practical gameplay value that is accomplished with magic find that could not be accomplished via changing the base drop rates.
Therefore we proceed to write a sig.