Guild Wars 2

- Cash shop Magic Find (& cash shop karma boosts) encourage static farming and tagging competitions to save time and maximise the use of the buffs before they run out.

- Magic find in general motivates a greedy playstyle that revolves around loot. In PvE at level 80 you might as well just stack magic find on everything, since the PvE isn’t so hard that a small reduction in effectiveness has much impact on your ability to play the game.

- For things to have any value, an economy must be designed to balance supply and demand. That means restricting loot drops (something GW2 does none too well right now for many items). But in the presence of magic find that implies balancing loot drops around the average magic find % a player will have. Consequently, if you build with no magic find you will get much less valuable loot than you would have done in a game where there was no such mechanism.

- if you wear magic find gear in dungeons you are kittening your party for the sake of personal gain.

- Magic find makes botters more productive and consequently fuels gold selling.

Agreed 100%. I was looking through the trading post to check what interesting runes and sigils I can use on my new armor, and I realized that they were all useless because the +60% magic find I can get from runes is far better than any of them. It really sucks that I have to choose between fun and practicality.

Magic find in Dungeons is the prisoner’s dilemma. If you cooperate and use non-MF stats, you clear the dungeon faster. If one person betrays the other and uses MF while the others don’t, he gets extra loot plus fast clear times. If both players betray one another and use MF, they all get long clear times.

The analogy kind of breaks down since the difference in clear times is so small on account of how trivial dungeons are at the moment, but it’s still a bad system.

“Many fans disliked Magic Find in Diablo 2, and object to its proposed presence in Diablo 3. The typical argument is that Magic Find only encouraged more use of Magic Find. Players had to wear gear with MF to find better items, and since many of the best items had Magic Find, they just increased their MF further, in a self-perpetuating cycle. Magic Find was also unbalanced, since spell-casting characters and ranged attackers could load up on it without suffering any real drawbacks, while melee fighters had to devote their gear to boosting their damage, defense, resistance, hit points, and other survival bonuses, and thus were at a disadvantage when it came to finding better gear.”

And look at what Diablo 3 has done with Magic Find now…

I’d rather focus on getting combat prepped and hope to get some good drops because of my skill than to have my skill trivialized due to MF. The ability to improve the quality in drops is ubiquitous to the point of subverting gameplay.

I’d rather have them remove MF from gear and have it specifically for weapon upgrades and consumables. That narrows things down a bit and still would leave space for skill over gear. Now skill doesn’t seem to mean squat to get good loot.

I think they got too much inspiration from Asian MMOs. :/

MF for consumables only is equally bad, as it promotes ditching any other consumable in favour MF ones. Removing MF from all items and consumables BUT cash shop boosters encourages "pay to win" philosophy of playing the economy. In fact, their only options are either leaving things as they are, OR removing MF completely from the game.

Demosthene.2195:

MF for consumables only is equally bad, as it promotes ditching any other consumable in favour MF ones. Removing MF from all items and consumables BUT cash shop boosters encourages “pay to win” philosophy of playing the economy. In fact, their only options are either leaving things as they are, OR removing MF completely from the game.

Or as a buff you receive from completing certain events. Honestly, again going back to Diablo 3 here (sadly), I’d like more of a reason to waste time killing Veterans and some of the higher ranked mobs in this game. Killing a Veteran only to loot a scrap of junk is disheartening, not to mention killing a champion or other higher ranking NPC. If killing them actually gave you a buff, like D3’s Nephalem Valor, then that would be something.

Removing MF completely from the game would be great but I think “pay to win” is Anet’s new matra, courtesy of NCsoft and their outlook on Asian MMOs where some people spend thousands in in-game shops.

They could narrow down MF to just consumables.

I hate magic find. In sPVP there is a wonderful minigame of working out the most optimal gear, traits, and runes combination. We want to do that in PVE aswell arenanet and not feel like we have to pay a very heavy tax for the privilege. Magic find is boring. But if you don’t have it you are paying a huge amount in lost gold for that choice. Not only that but it adds to the problem of wealth being unevenly concentrated. Please just double the drops rates and get rid of this stat on everything except food.

I completely agree.

It is yet another example that shows that the “PvE-architect(s)” of this game are pretty clueless. So many things in PvE are broken when looking at it from a system’s perspective.

Dungeons only meant to be played by the 10% best players. Nothing to do for the rest.
Gold being kept scarce, to encourage cashshop. Has impact on everything.
No gear grind, but grind for everything else.
Transportation system not fun.
Etc.
The concept of Magic Find fits right in. Kittycatted if you do, kittycatted if you don’t.

roqoco.4053:

- if you wear magic find gear in dungeons you are kittening your party for the sake of personal gain.

completely untrue, the group you party with matters far more. My group has no issue in dungeons only explorable versions really have us in any danger. Many of us who go wear magic find and it has no impact at all on the effectiveness of the group.

No, that’s just what you all sound like. You know what I do when there is something I don’t like in the game? I focus on the things I DO like and ignore that which I don’t. Magic Find is not game breaking in any sense. You all seem to have valid reasons for not liking Magic Find but there is one obvious solution. Don’t use it.

Trock Bronze.9625:

roqoco.4053:

- if you wear magic find gear in dungeons you are kittening your party for the sake of personal gain.

completely untrue, the group you party with matters far more. My group has no issue in dungeons only explorable versions really have us in any danger. Many of us who go wear magic find and it has no impact at all on the effectiveness of the group.

I think that highlights another problem, that dungeons are too easy. However the point that magic find is choosing a stat which only helps you the individual over another stat that could, theoretically, help the entire group is a good one.

Trock Bronze.9625:

completely untrue, the group you party with matters far more. My group has no issue in dungeons only explorable versions really have us in any danger. Many of us who go wear magic find and it has no impact at all on the effectiveness of the group.

Read the thread! Look at Strill’s (very astute) post below my op for an explanation of why MF is such as bad idea for group play that involves any kind of a challenge. And whether the content is or is not challenging is a completely different issue.

EDIT: And cross post. Grumwulf got their first.

Branwin.4609:

No, that’s just what you all sound like. You know what I do when there is something I don’t like in the game? I focus on the things I DO like and ignore that which I don’t. Magic Find is not game breaking in any sense. You all seem to have valid reasons for not liking Magic Find but there is one obvious solution. Don’t use it.

The obvious solution, the choice not to use it, is exactly what the entire thread is about.

As I stated almost my whole dungeon group has MF armor cause we farm elsewhere for money and yet we are very capable and have learned the dungeons we have played we can beat because we know how to do them, a 2% boost in stats here or there is not that big of an improvement, especially in explorable where you can get 1 shotted no matter what stats you have. I’m not for or against the argument here but I am telling you that in the case of dungeons MF is not ruining groups it is skill that is making them fail.

I agree MF doesn’t need to be in the game, but it is and it’s not as big an issue as people think it is. In group play that 2% is you know “Any little bit helps” but in the same token it’s not hurting either despite what is being said. What really needs to be worked on though is how they can make everyone feel their effort is worth while with or without magic find and yes right now magic find seems to be needed to ensure you get more money. The cost of various things are too high so people go out of their way to make sure they can get as much as possible, I am doing it along with thousands others and most of my guild. It does not hinder my guild however but removing it would let us focus on better stats and more strategic builds which I absolutely agree with.

I guess in closing, to reiterate, MF could be done away with but it is not hindering group play in any big way only skill of the individual is.

I’m packing a lot of Magic Find on my green lvl 80 gear that I use to get my exotics. Still, I think it is a very bad stat and only serves to unbalance the game.

@Trock Bronze

I’m sure most of us here know that MF is not dungeon breaking, since dungeons aren’t hard enough for it to make such a huge difference. But that just completely misses the point – MF is wrong in principle for grouping for exactly the reasons that Strill points out in the 3rd post in this thread. And further MF detracts from one of the major sources of fun (for many and very popular in GW1) in MMOs which is optimising your builds in the best and/or most fun way for the different challenges that you face.

@Branwin “No, that’s just what you all sound like. You know what I do when there is something I don’t like in the game? I focus on the things I DO like and ignore that which I don’t….”

This is a little irritating. The purpose of these forums for many of us is feedback on those features that work well and those that don’t. If I hated the game, I would go and play something else and not bother to comment at all. On the other hand if I thought it was so perfect that it couldn’t be improved, I wouldn’t post here either as that kind of post can get old fast.

I am not telling you to quit the game by any means, because to me that is not the solution. When I said I do the things I like, and I ignore that which I don’t, I was referring to specific features, not the game as a whole. No one should be deterred from doing things they enjoy (ie playing GW2 in general w/o delving into each and every specific pro and con)

Like I said before, MF is not game breaking in any way. It can be an annoyance if you see it that way for sure, but it’s not that bad. If you’re concerned about playing in dungeons with people who might “betray you” and use MF for “greedy, selfish gain” then I suggest making friends in-game and running dungeons with people you know and trust, and who have the personal skills to complete the dungeon. Keep in mind, this is a game, and not Days of Our Lives, so I doubt people using MF have betrayal and connivery in mind when they use it. Selfish? Yeah, probably. But it is what it is. I’m not playing for you or for anyone else, I am playing for my self.

I also don’t think you NEED MF to get any decent loot. I do think that the loot system could be reworked (a veteran or champion dropping less than a regular mob is most definitely discouraging and extremely irritating) but, again, it is not game breaking.*

I have a damage dealing set, a support set, and a farming set for my engineer. I tend to switch my traits around (missing dual spec) and I personally enjoy farming. I go from node to node and kill mobs and partake in DE’s along the way. MF, to me, is a nice bonus catering specifically to me as a farmer/crafter and it condones and encourages me to keep doing what I enjoy doing.

I enjoy MF and farming so I use MF to farm. I don’t enjoy PvP so I tend to not partake (I only participated to complete my map and it took some time) but do I think that PvP should be taken out of the game, like many people on this thread have suggested (or protested for that matter) for MF? No. I just choose to ignore PvP.

I apologize if you think I was encouraging you to put the game down completely, that wasn’t what I meant at all.

• I forgot my point. Prior to using Magic Find on a specific set I use for farming, I found all kinds of things varying in rarity but not as often. I think it’s a perk stat, not a necessary stat if you want to find all the best items you can find.

To add, while optimizing your build and putting the right stats on gear is your cup of tea, it is not for many people. A lot of people came to GW2 because of the claims that there was no more grind for gear. I do agree that bringing MF to a dungeon is not fair, but that is not so much Magic Find’s fault as it is the person using it.

Please Magic Find responsibly.

@Branwin

When Jon Peters was discussing why the DR system was in place, one of the things that he mentioned was that they didn’t want one playstyle to be orders of magnitude more rewarding than other playstyles (quite right!). Farming is fine, if that’s what you really like doing, but there is no need for the game to provide potent fertilizer in order to make it even more effective than it already is, since that is exactly another way of pushing players who don’t enjoy farming into feeling that it’s something that they need to do.

And the presence of magic find as an enhancement to farming also has the effect that drop rates need to be reduced for those who don’t use it, which then makes it close to essential for crafters who want to get sufficient drops to support their crafting. If you aren’t sure why that must be the case, I put an explanation in the op.

I’m not sure what kind of impact you think MF really has, but it truly is minimal. Stacking loads of Magic Find does not give me bounds of loot more than when I don’t use it. It is not necessary, pivotal, essential, etc.

Drop rates already have diminishing returns if you stay in the same place for too long. Such is the case for botters, who are often stationary and spamming the same ability. Magic Find isn’t what set that code in motion, botters did (with or without MF).

Also, diminishing returns affect everyone, whether you are a botter, a Magic Find farmer, or otherwise. I have to disagree with your belief that magic find is what sets reduced loot drop rates in motion, simply because we all already know why.

The truth is, game would lose nothing if MF was removed. In fact, people would subconsciously gravitate towards their favourite build, instead of feeling pigeon-holed into MF set "not to stay behind in the economic game".

Personally I’ve chosen to for an unorthodox build that doesn’t have all that much AoE to farm DEs or raw damage to tag mobs quickly (no MF at all), but I’m not sure how long it will last as I’m wrapping things up, finalising my gear and slowly accumulating wealth for my legendary.

I can already complete TA explorable with half my eyes closed, and open-world content + farming is orders of magnitude easier than that, making MF the most natural choice. If anything, I’d suggest to Anet that they increase the difficulty of DEs & dungeons, provide more incentives & rewards for group play, remove MF and make it worthwhile to farm lower-level areas instead of just sticking to high-level zones farming T6 materials mostly.

What then, if my favorite “build” is my Magic Find “build” and they take it away? Would I “subconsciously gravitate” towards my favorite build, or would I just be pigeon-holed into playing the game the way you think I should?

I’m sure they want people to buy the boosters so I don’t think MF will go anytime soon. I despise the whole concept just as much as the DR mechanics though..

@ Branwin

Stat-wise, there are about 10 (not counting MF) primary types of armour/weapon, 6 types of trinkets (not counting MF). There are 2 MF armour/weapon types (power precision MF, power condition MF), 1 MF trinket type (power precision MF).

If you say "my favourite MF build", I take it that you simply focus around power & precision (berserker) or power & condition (either rampager or carrion). If you wanted to substitute stats from your MF build, you could easily do so with gear already available at the game, and even benefit from the third attribute line bonus (like crit damage on top of power & precision, or vitality on top of power & condition).

If there was no MF gear in the game, you wouldn’t feel the pressure to get it. The only unique component of your "MF build" is MF, to get more magical items from farming than other people not using it. Problem would be non-existent and no stat sacrifices would be made, if MF wasn’t introduced into the game.

Before you reply, I’ll explain my terminology - by a "build" I understand a particular combination of primary stats (power, precision, toughness etc.), traits and skills. What MF gear does, is that it’s kittening your total pool of stats, in turn giving you MF (purely an economic motivation with no effect on the "build" itself and how it works).

I hope you understand my point better, and not reply with another knee-jerk reaction. Liking MF and the benefits it provides over players that don’t use it is one thing, claiming that MF gear provides "unique build opportunities" is another (the latter is also false, and that’s the impression I got from your post).

For all I care, they could remove MF altogether and increase the global loot rate, or quality of loot. Essentially, everyone would have "MF" without kittening their build (say, you want to focus on power toughness vitality, but it’s impossible because there is no MF gear with at least two of these stats, or the build would be completely dysfunctional if MF replaced any of the attribute bonuses from it). There you have it - MF creating less incentive for varied & interesting builds.

“What then, if my favorite “build” is my Magic Find “build” and they take it away? Would I “subconsciously gravitate” towards my favorite build, or would I just be pigeon-holed into playing the game the way you think I should?”

The thing is though, your magic find build is your favourite build, because when using it you get a great deal more of the available gold than everyone else does. It’s a bit like a mom giving one of her children a “more cake hat”. Then when it is suggested that the cake be more evenly divided, the child then complains that they aren’t being allowed to wear their favourite hat: “I want more than my share of the cake, cos I have the more cake hat!”

I have never used MF except those few boosters you get as rewards from some quests. I just chose not to use it and use “real” stats instead. Haven’t had problems getting full exotic gear and enough money even without it so I don’t think it is necessary to use it.

If you are thinking wether you should use it or not, maybe do a test. Play a week with MF gear and after that a week without MF and compare the results and playing experience as a whole and choose which one you prefer

I agree, the game would be better without MF.

However I do like Threat Level Zero’s suggestion of getting the temp buff as a reward for taking down tough mobs like veterans.

None of this really matters though as MF is here to stay no matter what we say.

LOCO.1785:

I agree, the game would be better without MF.

However I do like Threat Level Zero’s suggestion of getting the temp buff as a reward for taking down tough mobs like veterans.

None of this really matters though as MF is here to stay no matter what we say.

Yeah, I reckon that’s a really good idea too. +1 Threat Level Zero.

When you wear full crit gear suddenly you see huge crits, when you wear condition gear the spew of little numbers over the mobs head gets much much impressive, when you wear healing or toughness gear you see your survival improve. What do you see when you wear MF gear, except all those above things go down? You don’t see anything, you just know theoritically that your bags are filling up twice as fast. Boring.

Loot rarity should be balanced around no magic find, the point of magic find is to improve drop percentages, not be necessary just for the chance to get anything.

Agemnon.4608:

Loot rarity should be balanced around no magic find, the point of magic find is to improve drop percentages, not be necessary just for the chance to get anything.

No that doesn’t work. Magic find increases the prevalence of rare items in the economy and consequently drives down their prices (supply and demand), that means that non MF users will get lower prices for the fewer rare items they actually do find. So whatever way you do it it will cause people who don’t use it to be at a disadvantage compared to a situation where MF was used by noone. That’s basic economics at work: There’s only a finite amount of cake and if you give more of it to some players, the others get less than their share.

i agree…mf is just bad everywhere,total nonsense stats imho

MF is a bad idea. For one thing at lvl 80 it is almost a requirement to have a decent amount of it just to get reasonable drops to pay their way at that level. People should be stating for their class and playstyle not loot.

I also don’t think you NEED MF to get any decent loot. I do think that the loot system could be reworked (a veteran or champion dropping less than a regular mob is most definitely discouraging and extremely irritating) but, again, it is not game breaking.*

So you’re saying that my 158% magic find is not giving me far far better loot than any other equipment would? I beg to differ.

I wonder if the people arguing against the OP actually realize how much magic find you can get in this game.

I think the 40% or so you can get on food, and the stats you sacrifice from the other food is just about right for magic find. It’s still a choice, it’s still pretty significant but it doesn’t affect your enjoyment of being optimized in your gear.

To be fair, magic find doesn’t really do much of anything. You start with about a 1% chance to find anything of worth. Increasing that with a maximized near 200% magic find (or whatever) will bring you barely over 2%. Now consider how expensive making a magic find set IS. You will never, ever make all that money back.

Of course there’s always a story of “I equipped my MF gear and immediately got three rares!” That’s just sample size and statistics playing games with you. A coin has a 50% chance of flipping to tails, but could you flip it to tails 20 times in a row to win a million dollars? Sure. And some people will assure you that because they did it, that the rate is actually very favorable. It isn’t. It’s just the coincidence of working with limited empirical evidence.

Just make a normal set and use an omnomberry bar. You’re seriously not missing anything. It kind of annoys me, but then again, if a MF set was worth using, then everyone would use nothing but a MF set. I honestly think they should either have never included it at all, or made it limited to amulets – a single item you equip to change your build. But that’s ruined already with the unnecessary inclusion of so many unnecessary accessory slots that exist only to increase the amount of gold sinks in the game. I really hate this about MMOs, and it’s one of the things I hate about GW2.

I don’t mind it too much, there isn’t a wide area of choices a mesmer has regarding runes practicality, so I run with MF runes.

@ plague,
100% MF doubles your loot %. So if someone farms a lot 1G of loot per hr becomes 2G.

It can pay back but at the cost of play enjoyment since you have to carry 2 sets of armor or have to play with nerfed armor (MF instead of your prefered stat)

So yeah, it is a bad thing to have in the game.

If players devoted a secondary set for farming with high mf and noble runes, so be it.
But, they don’t do they? Instead they choose to stack it and forget about it, typical single player mentality at it’s best.

This is the kind of behavior you need to PUNISH and DISCOURAGE and not ENCOURAGE. The high repair bills of no skilled glass-cannons with no utility sadly, are shared by their teammates mostly til they do what we all despise having to do.
Kick the player and replace them

agreeing to most points in OP. "For things to have any value, an economy must be designed to balance supply and demand. " is completely wrong though. Supply and demand balance themselves and working economies form guided by the good ol invisible hand exactly when NOT being meddled with according to some great design.

@Algreg – Remember that the designers largely control supply by setting the drop rate of items & frequency of resource nodes. Strictly speaking I might have left out the reference to design, but of course it is appropriate for game economies.

Magic Find is fine
my problem is the economy is based around the TP completely as a result, drop rates are incredibly low and your forced into coughing up gold to buy it from a global market.

compare this to other games where the Auction house system is unique per server, drop rates are raised to be much higher and farming was tolerable, here farming things like Lodestones is nothing but a nightmare.

magic find is a wrong concept in any game, like it was on diablo2 also.

You equip MF to get better loot, but then you play with MF instead with that loot…

I think that if MF didn’t exist in this game it wouldn’t be an issue. It doesn’t add anything positive by its existence but it does create issues.

@roqoco: yep, that is the meddling part I am not too happy with (I mean, do we really need a new spawning mechanism for orichalcum nodes every update). But do not take my post as negative criticism of you OP in general. Though i play by its rules, I am not fond of MF either. It feels like a very artificial concept “cardboarded” over the game. Looting mechanics are always illogical to some degree as dead monsters would leave behind everything they own, including full bodies of scales instead of one meagre scale, but I do not see any reason to add up to the weirdness with magical luck boosting attributes.

I fully agree that MF is a bad mechanic.

I have every non feast type cooking recipe. I only use one. Omnom bars.

The gear I wear the most? My MF set. I use this MF set to grind for my other sets.. which I never wear because MF is more practical.

I only agree with MF if it comes from a source that no other stats come from (like guild banners).

If other stats have to compete with MF, they would have to allow you to kill at an increased rate fast enough to compensate for the loss of MF. However this can’t happen due to running out of mobs to kill. Therefor MF will always win.

I can agree with most of the reasons people are against magic find. Except for the one where it hurts the party. That is totally subjective and based on the player.

For example, what if someone stacks power + precision on their armor and dies all the time. Did they screw the party by not taking toughness + vitality as much as the guy thats traited the same and hasn’t been downed once but decided to take magic find over toughness?

Without accounting for the player and their build as a whole, you cant make a statement as broad as everyone that uses magic find gear in a dungeon is screwing everyone they party with.

@AcidicVision – if someone makes a glass cannon build that isn’t optimal for dungeons then that’s an honest mistake in most cases, since people don’t usually choose to kitten their kit all other things being equal. OTOH when you choose MF you are basically saying that you want more loot for yourself even if by doing so you perform less well and you increase your party’s chances of wiping (by whatever small degree – we had that discussion already). i.e. MF encourages selfish behavior, you are no longer playing the game of optimizing your gear for different challenges only of optimizing it for the maximal possible personal gain. That’s directly contrary to what I understood Arenanet’s design goals to be.

I agree with Quintal. Earlier I said the magic find on food was ok but it’s true that magic find food is the only food I use, completely making pointless all the other, more interesting, foods.