Guild Wars 2

so two of my guild mates spent an hour and half grinding one area. they had one with the magic find buff from the pumpkin food (cant remember its name but it came from the Halloween event.) the one with out the buff got more items then the one with. and yes the one with had a magic find of 275 from the buffs while the other had 150 magic find. wondering if this is a fluke or if magic find from buffs is not working?

Even with Magic Find boosts, there’s still RNG at play. An hour and a half between two people isn’t enough sample size.

devilsace.7694:

so two of my guild mates spent an hour and half grinding one area. they had one with the magic find buff from the pumpkin food (cant remember its name but it came from the Halloween event.) the one with out the buff got more items then the one with. and yes the one with had a magic find of 275 from the buffs while the other had 150 magic find. wondering if this is a fluke or if magic find from buffs is not working?

There is no way to actually prove that Magic Find is or isn’t working, and Arenanet knows that their faithful players will, just as above me, spout the “rng is rng” mantra to cover for it.

Neural.1824:

devilsace.7694:

so two of my guild mates spent an hour and half grinding one area. they had one with the magic find buff from the pumpkin food (cant remember its name but it came from the Halloween event.) the one with out the buff got more items then the one with. and yes the one with had a magic find of 275 from the buffs while the other had 150 magic find. wondering if this is a fluke or if magic find from buffs is not working?

There is no way to actually prove that Magic Find is or isn’t working, and Arenanet knows that their faithful players will, just as above me, spout the “rng is rng” mantra to cover for it.

Haha, so true.

If you have 300% magic find and a base 0.05% chance for Item X to drop, you effectively have a modified 0.15% chance for Item X to drop.

Huge percentage values seem very impressive, until they’re applied to the variables in question, wherein which one learns that even 3*infinitesimal is still pretty infinitesimal.

All in all, drop rates are wretched for a great many things, and improving them threefold (at best) doesn’t do a thing to take that out of ‘wretched’ territory. You’re not likely to notice a significant increase in drop values over a mere hour or two of farming anything, even comparing 0% MF to 300% MF.

You’ll notice it over long spans of time consistently spent farming.

Worth it? If you’re farming, sure, its a small speed increase to the acquisitions of moar and better shtuffs, but don’t expect it to ever feel like a dramatic boost to chow down on some +30% MF food.

There’s nothing dramatic about full 300% MF courtesy of the variables modified being microscopic in many cases anyway.

Also don’t forget that MF only applies to loot dropped from killing mobs, it doesn’t affect containers like loot bags and chests and ANet tend to deliver the rare stuff in containers these days.

Neural.1824:

There is no way to actually prove that Magic Find is or isn’t working, and Arenanet knows that their faithful players will, just as above me, spout the “rng is rng” mantra to cover for it.

This may be tongue-and-cheek, but it also has the merit of being true. We don’t have a solid metric to prove whether magic find has any forthcoming effect. We can speculate like mad, but the random numbers generator is exactly what it is.

Random.

So your guess is as good as mine, his, hers, and everyone else’s.

well if you are really fanatic you could get 5+ fold… with an xp booster (50%), laureate xp booster (30%), celebration booster (100%) and pumpking thingy (30%) and 30% MF food, banner (10/15%) and guild bonus (10%)…

devilsace.7694:

the one with out the buff got more items then the one with. and yes the one with had a magic find of 275 from the buffs while the other had 150 magic find. wondering if this is a fluke or if magic find from buffs is not working?

Magic find does not increase the number of items you get, it only increases the chance
that they have a better quality.

RNGesus killed “magic find” a long, long time ago, but you can keep eating the MF food for giggles and funs.

Did they spend the 1st 45 minutes without the food buff then apply it for the last 45 minutes?
If so then it simply sounds like diminishing returns to me (which shouldn’t even exist to the extent it does since the bot trains died out long ago but that is a whole other topic).

In my personal experience killing the same mobs for 45 minutes straight is plenty of time to hit DR.

This is the problem with RNG. There’s no way to tell if MF works at all. Not without a large sample size (say 1000 people farming with the same low MF% and another 1000 farming with a high MF%) – all farming the exact same nodes and meticulously recording what they got – then do a comparison. But since that will never happen, we will never be sure if MF is simply a red herring or if it, in fact, works.

We all know someone with a relatively low MF that got a precursor or some other awesome drop vs something with a high MF that has never had any drops like that. We all just put it down to the RNG and leave it at that.

destroy it, there is your solution

John Smith.4610:

Cakemeister.5792:

I just want magic find to make a difference.

Magic find makes a huge difference.

John Smith is the game Economist.