Guild Wars 2

As the title asks, I have no clue how drop rates in this game work.

Me and my friend were testing out magic find the other day, getting the same gear for it. Going to a zone neither of us had been in before (We are the same level), we partied up and slaughtered everything.

Yet for every drop I seemed to get, he seemed to get three more than I did every time. We have the same kind of gear, granted he is a necromancer and I am an engineer. I am just confused how come this happens, as I don’t seem to notice any huge difference in drop rates with magic find levels above 40%.

Is there some kind of diminishing return on the drop rates?

There is a diminishing return on farming the same type of creature in for an extended period of time. This is the problem people have with Orr. Last I heard, everything is categorized as Orrian so people are getting the DR pretty quick since DEs are pretty much all enemy zergs.

As I understand loot:
Every monster, chest and area has a loot table. Everything in that table has a % chance to drop. So a white item might have a 50% drop rate, a blue – 30%, green – 15%, gold – 4.8% and Orange – 0.2%.

Magic find factors in to the existing chance for a magic item to drop. So that 0.2% chance for an exotic becomes a 0.4% chance if you have 100% magic find. Your 4.8% becomes 7.2% with 50% magic find.

Thats a little over simplified, but it’s the general idea.

Even with a high Magic Find, it still comes down to luck. All magic find does is increase your chances. I experienced the same situation last night while running Dungeons with my guild. Me and a guild mate have the same magic find, yet in the first dungeon he got tons of greens and a couple yellows, while all I got were blues. The exact opposite happened in the 2nd dungeon however, then we ended up getting about the same drops in dungeon 3. Magic Find still has a RNG concept, you just have better chances to get good items.