Guild Wars 2

One thing that kinda puzzles me about this game, why is there a magic find stat? Perhaps a Dev could give us some reasoning why they chose to have such a stat that can be put on actual gear (I wouldn’t mind so much if it was say, just food buffs/guild banners that provided it). Do they want us to have many different sets of gear on us at a time, or am I missing some aspect of this?

People use it when they kill bosses and stuff to increase the chance of getting rares.

Yes, I know that. But why put it as such a wanted stat in an MMO. Only times I see stats such as MF is in games like Diablo and other dungeon crawlers.

Calsifer.6079:

People use it when they kill bosses and stuff to increase the chance of getting rares.

I think the question isn’t “what is it used for?”, but rather, “why does it exist in the first place?”

Since Magic Find is pretty much a “must-have” for farming purposes, it seems like it would make more sense to just increase drop rates across the board and cut out the middle-man. Especially since the current setup essentially encourages more farming/grinding (grinding for gold to buy/craft your MF gear, so you can increase your chance to loot while farming to make money…). It’s all very circular and needlessly complicated.

If Magic Find was a rare buff or was difficult to find, or extremely strong but limited in duration, it would make more sense. It would be a sort of be a “bonus” during your farming time that you normally wouldn’t get, and you have to use your time wisely to make as much use out of it as possible.

But as it stands right now, it’s pretty easy to come by, and just encourages extra farming.

This puzzles me too. The rest of the game is built around social play and encouraging teamwork.

But Magic Find armour encourages you to deliberately nerf your character’s survivability or damage output in the hopes of getting better loot; in social play, this means your team members are picking up your slack and you’re gaining the benefit. It’s all cool if everyone knows what’s going on but in PUGs it’s a very subtle form of griefing.

It also helps bots it seems like. Since it only works for kill drops (as a dev said) most bot trains I see just telehack to different areas/events with high mob spawns. I would really hope they could just cut out MF, and instead reward an item chest from event completions, or as you said Greyfeld, jump drop rates all around.

Around 16 years ago, I used to play on MUDs. My family didn’t really have a computer that could play any high-graphics video game, much less an MMO, and MUDs were free to play as long as you had access to a Telnet server.

One particular MUD was called End of the Line (EOTL). The game was rough, between unforgiving monsters, ruthless player-killers, and a punishing death system that penalized experience and forced you to leave a corpse that anybody could loot, forcing you to lose all your items if you were unlucky or too slow to run back to your body.

Amidst all that, there was a weapon that was a total game-changer if you got your hands on it. It was called the Luck Blade. You didn’t farm for it, loot it off a special mob, or buy it from anywhere. The server’s RNG system just randomly picked a person who was logged in from time to time, and dumped this item into their inventory. For the next 10-ish minutes, this ridiculously powerful magic weapon was yours to use to hack through waves of enemies. It scaled with your stats, and completely decimated equal-level mobs with very little effort.

But once your ten minutes was up? Poof It was gone, until the next time you got lucky.

The point is, stats and items that increase your farming ability should be rare, difficult to acquire, and/or very short-lived. Adding them as an easy-to-acquire permanent item for every character is essentially telling the playerbase to farm in order to raise the drop rate to the level it’s actually supposed to be. It feels necessary, rather than a bonus, and creates an extra arbitrary grind.

I think magic find should be removed. The only people I see using it are the hundreds of bots in orr. Even if you have MF, they’ll be making more money so they control the prices, not you..

The Good Era of MMORPG was on Ultima Online ,Real Crafters System, REal pvp style with pk(You die you loose all), Real time skill gain base personal status. Each character was a total other world compared with others chars.

Actually mmorpgs are grind fest. And mostly no custom Status and not you own system of skills.

In theory, Magic Find makes sense.

You sacrifice a lot of your damage/survivability for an increased chance to receive better loot. In theory the game is now “harder” and so your reward is better. Essentially Magic Find is supposed to increase the risk/reward factor.

But it really doesn’t work like that in practice.

The main use of Magic Find is for grinding events with large numbers of other people, making them no challenge whatsoever. That’s why the “sacrifice” you make isn’t really relevant. In Dungeons, something that should fundamentally be a cooperative experience, people are encouraged to kitten their own performance for the sake of more/better loot.

It was already a problematic stat in Diablo III and that game was essentially about farming. Guild Wars 2 is about more than just farming and I think the Magic Find stat really has no place in such a game.

Keep the booster, keep the food if you must, even the Runes would be bearable….but remove the rest of the Magic Find stat from gear.

I agree it is kinda odd. I considered getting myself a full magic find set, but I have since decided it wasn’t worth the money/bank space for me and just use omnom bars instead. I wouldn’t mind if it were removed from armor. It is annoying that all 8 of my characters should get a MF set of armor, jewelry, and weapons (with MF runes and sigils) if they really want to farm….That and the fact that even a high MF boost may not improve loot that much….

I don’t like it. It’s not fun giving up some of your characters power in order to have a better chance at dropping loot. I think the food buffs are the perfect place for magic find, but not gear.

It’s also kind of weird, since you are usually working towards getting better gear, and so you don your magic find gear to farm mats, golds, exotics, to improve your gear. But once you actually do improve your gear—- you won’t actually wear it most of the time. You’ll still wear your magic find gear to increase drop rates.

I definitely say when I first saw it in beta I was all “oh god this again.” I play a lot of dungeon crawlers so I know all about stacking magic find.

But in this game I can’t really be bothered to get another set of gear for farming purposes. I still don’t think it is extremely effective. I just ignore its existence outside of food buffs and go on my merry way.

i see the appeal of using MF gear, but, i just use the “x bar” food when out in the world and stated food for dungeons. i do notice a difference in my drops with just using the bars.

plus, i’m too lazy/cheap to get a magic find set, l0l.

Dee Jay.2460:

In theory, Magic Find makes sense.

You sacrifice a lot of your damage/survivability for an increased chance to receive better loot. In theory the game is now “harder” and so your reward is better. Essentially Magic Find is supposed to increase the risk/reward factor.

I really like this assessment here. In GW1, there was no magic find. You would simply do something that made the game harder to increase your chances of better loot. Hard mode versions made all mobs in the zone a lot more difficult to kill, but dropped better things. You would also decrease the amount of party member support to increase your drops. Both of these things made the game more difficult but provided better rewards. Players had to get very creative the more difficult they made their game and were amply rewarded for their skill and ingenuity.

In the end, the majority of the items that drop are trash. Even when you have your MF jacked up you might get a few more rare’s, and more greens. wow. better quality trash.

I never used magic find on my way up to 80. One day, I decided to try it. I went from never finding rares to finding one every few hours. In comparison to normal gear, all I’m losing is survivability, but I’m no where near dying anyways, so it’s not an issue. I’m forced to wear magic find, else I’m wasting my time killing mobs, in the sense I know I’ll be losing out if I don’t wear it.

One of the biggest faults in the game is that you’re not rewarded for effort. It’s far too easy to just effortlessly zerg compared to soloing or doing it properly.

I’m not really a farmer, but Magic Find gear always hit me as something that goes against the general encouraged playstyles (play well, don’t slack/get carried). As a non-farmer and non-dungeon runner I’m actually slightly confused and I’m sure more people are: Is Magic Find gear considered required for obtaining loot (aswell as mystic forge)? I really don’t like the concept in any way, as a player who would rather play as good as he can, using gear that helps my team or performance.

So, personally, I’d prefer to see Magic Find removed from gear, runes and sigils, because of the way it forces players to use it. The consumable buffs seem ok, they don’t change your method of playing the game other than losing out on a few stats other food would give, although I’d personally still prefer the food buff to also be removed, leaving just the item shop buff. Not to make the game ‘pay to win’, but because the item shop buff doesn’t remove anything in order for you to use Magic Find.

Result: Everyone plays for best team play and personal performance. Gear and food buffs that help you play the role you prefer, with no feeling of being forced to use Magic Find at the cost of the rest, but, still keeping the optional 50% Magic Find booster.

GregT.4702:

This puzzles me too. The rest of the game is built around social play and encouraging teamwork.

But Magic Find armour encourages you to deliberately nerf your character’s survivability or damage output in the hopes of getting better loot; in social play, this means your team members are picking up your slack and you’re gaining the benefit. It’s all cool if everyone knows what’s going on but in PUGs it’s a very subtle form of griefing.

MF is basically optional hardmode. You take a hit to your character for the increased chance at loot.

There is simply no reason to have Magic Find in an MMO. If they want all players to be equal then all players should have an equal chance to find drops (unless they’ve spent gems on boosters). You sacrifice utility for probability.

dimgl.4786:

There is simply no reason to have Magic Find in an MMO. If they want all players to be equal then all players should have an equal chance to find drops (unless they’ve spent gems on boosters). You sacrifice utility for probability.

optional and the loot drops aren’t great its just better vendor trash to make more money. still its optional having it doesn’t hurt just like not having it wouldnt hurt since your not forced to use it. I know plenty that farm cursed in regular gear. I farm it in MF gear. Them doing it in regular gear doesn’t effect me and vice versa. Why care that its in the game its there it doesn’t hurt anything and half the time you don’t know who is wearing what anyway unless you ask.

For me, like oZii said, MF is some sort of hard mode. When you wear it, you nerf yourself. If you can farm Orr on your own with MF gear, good for you!

BUT… there should be some way to stop people from using MF in dungeons (and even for events, altough I imagine that would be harder to implement).

Players that use MF when grouped are basically selfish people that do not pull their weight in the group but rely on the strength of others to get more loot themselves.

I personally think MF in dungeon groups is not that much of an issue provided it is used in the relevant dungeon. I pretty much run my MF for almost everything, but I do keep my non MF gear with me at all times for when I do the more difficult dungeons.

Stuff like AC for example really is not difficult. Running MF there makes a marginal difference to your performance but can greatly increase the average profit you make from doing runs.

While I would agree that a player sitting in MF while their group is struggling with the content at hand is selfish, but if you are clearing it with no issues I see no problem. Running on the same logic you could also call people who do dungeons who are not level 80 and in full exotic gear are selfish, relying on the strength of others to get though difficult content, as they certainly won’t pull the same weight as the aforementioned players would.

In my personal experience with GW2, if you can do the dungeon you can do the dungeon, better gear just makes it go faster, and the amount of difference MF gear makes to your performance if you are good is negligible, especially in dungeons that scale your level down. That being said I do feel like MF isn’t really a fun mechanic, all it does is marginally increase the quality of your loot, so it only feels like you are getting better loot when you loot on a mass scale (i.e. farming events in CS). With this in mind as well, it does make me wonder whether in dungeons, speed over MF may be preferable. It all depends whether the average value of an item you loot is increased sufficiently for the extra time it takes to loot said item. You may be better off just killing things quicker and essentially looting more frequently.

Makes you wonder if there is a single player in this game that likes MF. Certainly removing it would have absolutely no negative effect on the game. I wish they´d just get rid of the whole thing, improve the loot percentage across the board instead and never mention that abomination of a stat again.

Tumbero.3945:

The Good Era of MMORPG was on Ultima Online ,Real Crafters System, REal pvp style with pk(You die you loose all), Real time skill gain base personal status. Each character was a total other world compared with others chars.

Golden era of MMOs? Yeah, for how long?
They’ve made this kind of games more accessible to all audiences, rather than just to elitist hardcore players.
Because not everyone wants to lose all the time they’ve wasted building a character that in the end will lose everything upon death.
Long ago, when I used to play Runescape, I accidentally ran into a PvP zone and got killed and dropped almost everything. Needless to say, I trashed the game.

I don’t know what kind of masochism afflicts the so called hardcore players, but if I have to invest time in something virtual it better be guaranteed. There is already a game called “real life” that makes us rich and poor on its own, and there is no option to create a new character in it.

@Hermes: it is called thrill and excitement. Some people like that, others don´t – just because someone else likes a different playstyle that isn´t a reason to attack him. Noone here asked for a free for all pvp system.

Algreg.3629:

Makes you wonder if there is a single player in this game that likes MF. Certainly removing it would have absolutely no negative effect on the game. I wish they´d just get rid of the whole thing, improve the loot percentage across the board instead and never mention that abomination of a stat again.

Well, it would certainly piss off a lot of players that purchased or crafted MF gear.

I am sure they could just ‘turn’ the MF stat into something else, perhaps. That way gear pieces with it are not removed, and people can still use them. Maybe even have them become unsoulbound if such a thing happens to they could at least sell them if the stats are not what they want. Then again, I have no idea how difficult it would be to do such a thing from a programming end.

For those saying it is a sort of hard mode, why have to wear a set of gear for it? Why not just build some sort of trigger into an encounter/dungeon for such a thing. Can talk to an NPC at start of dungeon and it will buff mobs a bit for chance at better loot in that current instance. Or not kill an add in a fight right off and it transforms into a powerful mob that gives better loot when killed. Plenty of more elegant ways of doing it.

I think Magic Find is an abysmal system right now. I have no idea why it has to be there. We should not be forced to inherently always nerf our characters performance in order to be selfish to get better loot.

Cut Magic Find from the game, and up the universal drop of everything to compensate the removal of Magic Find.

Again – Remove Magic Find!

Its a stupid system, and even more stupid that a game that promotes team play, and community.

Keep in mind, that the people that take the time to post are usually the ones with something negative to say. Hence, I will take the time to say: I like magic find. I’m sure there are plenty of people who like magic find. They are just busy looking for rares and not here complaining.

I agree it should be removed from gear at least, the loot system in general needs work and I would like more ways to make money outside of farming arah because that is not fun.

PCPrincess.7394:

Keep in mind, that the people that take the time to post are usually the ones with something negative to say. Hence, I will take the time to say: I like magic find. I’m sure there are plenty of people who like magic find. They are just busy looking for rares and not here complaining.

PCPrincess, is there a specific reason you like it? Do you feel it brings some aspect to the game that makes it worthwhile? Genuinely interested.