what does magic find items do for me in the game?
Makes you think you will get more/better drops.
I think it literally increases the chance you get for better drops—blue/green/other quality drop, instead of the normal white vendor trash. Same goes for rare® items from gathering nodes, like the gems from mineral nodes.
Magic find increases the chances of you finding magic items.
I was running around in a group with 2 guys we started in Malchor’s Leap and went through cursed shore getting all the oricalchum/orrian/omnom nodes and doing all DEs we ran across.
They each had the exalted explorers gear (native 3% magic find) and 5 superior runes of the pirate(more MF) 1 rune of the traveler(more MF) opal accessorys(even more MF) they topped their gear off with MF weapons and the MF consumable from the gem store.
I had nothing adding MF
Over the course of about an hours time they had each gotten 3-4 rare items and many green items. I got several blues and greens
We repeated this for 4 days in a row with similar outcomes every night.
I never got a single rare drop
After 4 days of that I dumped money into just the runes they had and put them on lvl 80 karma gear.
That night on the same run I got 2 rares. followed the next with 3 and last night with 2.