Guild Wars 2

Does it really… I have it on now not really noticing much.

It does work. The problem is what it does is actually relatively limited and doesn’t always work as players expect it to.

For a start it only affects drops from enemies. It doesn’t help with chests, bags, quest/dungeon rewards etc. And you’re still limited to what’s normally in those enemies loot tables. You can boost your magic find as high as it will go and you’ll still never (for example) get a precursor from an enemy who is below level 80 because it’s not in their loot table.

On top of that it only gives you a percentage chance at better loot. I’m not sure what the base chance is (I think it varies between enemies) but the example the wiki uses is that if you have a 1/10 chance of getting a rare item then a 200% magic find boost will raise that to a 3/10 chance.

The only time I’ve noticed any difference from magic find is when I was running around Southsun with the 200% boost. With less than that I suspect you’d have to record all your drops to be able to really see any difference.

It’s also important to remember that rarity is determined entirely by the games categories. The algorithm doesn’t care if a particular green item has 1000+ copies selling for 1s each on the TP. It still classifies it as rarer and more valuable than all blue items. Likewise it also doesn’t allow for the demand on particular crafting materials. So in some cases farming with higher magic find can actually hurt your chances of getting what you wanted.

Overall if your aim is to make more gold then higher magic find will help you. If you’re aiming for specific drops then it depends greatly on what you’re going for and where it might come from. It might help, it might not. It might even hurt your chances if the magic find doesn’t affect your chance and you’re sacrificing other stats which could allow you to complete attempts faster and therefore do more in the same time period.

Danikat pretty much nailed it but the problem many players face are the sample size. Since there are very few places that will provide you a lot of mobs all at once you can not see if magic find is in play.

I personally seen how magic find would get me rare items doing the same farm with magic find and without magic find.

Not enough to be worth worrying about.

Actually I disagree with above comments. I have used for example magic forge whiteout boosting and with boost of magic find on the mystic forge and i can see the probabilities higher when i use magic find booster.

I recommend it if your purpose is to get rare items in order to sale.

.. or you all above are right and I’m just terribly lucky

Danikat.8537:

It does work. The problem is what it does is actually relatively limited and doesn’t always work as players expect it to.

For a start it only affects drops from enemies. It doesn’t help with chests, bags, quest/dungeon rewards etc. And you’re still limited to what’s normally in those enemies loot tables. You can boost your magic find as high as it will go and you’ll still never (for example) get a precursor from an enemy who is below level 80 because it’s not in their loot table.

On top of that it only gives you a percentage chance at better loot. I’m not sure what the base chance is (I think it varies between enemies) but the example the wiki uses is that if you have a 1/10 chance of getting a rare item then a 200% magic find boost will raise that to a 3/10 chance.

The only time I’ve noticed any difference from magic find is when I was running around Southsun with the 200% boost. With less than that I suspect you’d have to record all your drops to be able to really see any difference.

It’s also important to remember that rarity is determined entirely by the games categories. The algorithm doesn’t care if a particular green item has 1000+ copies selling for 1s each on the TP. It still classifies it as rarer and more valuable than all blue items. Likewise it also doesn’t allow for the demand on particular crafting materials. So in some cases farming with higher magic find can actually hurt your chances of getting what you wanted.

Overall if your aim is to make more gold then higher magic find will help you. If you’re aiming for specific drops then it depends greatly on what you’re going for and where it might come from. It might help, it might not. It might even hurt your chances if the magic find doesn’t affect your chance and you’re sacrificing other stats which could allow you to complete attempts faster and therefore do more in the same time period.

Pretty much this – MF plus a slew of mobs will make a significant difference in your gold per hour.

Once I heard MF was changing significantly, I swapped all my MF gear out to survivability gear. As soon as I did that, I noticed fewer exotics and rares over a play session.

Because that’s subjective, I define “fewer” as: out of three 18-slot bags, I previously got approximately 1-3 exotics and 3-5 rares per session of (for example) running 8-10 events in the North of the Hirathi Hinterlands (that’s 2.5-ish runs of the chain starting at the Hirathi attack on the two outposts before I’d get bored and change to something else).

After changing to non-MF gear, I’d get 1-2 of each for the same session. With just my character/account-based MF (3%, I believe), lots of greens still drop, and more blues than I can count.