Guild Wars 2

Finally got 80! hurray! my crafting light armor is 400 and now i have 2 choices ahead of me , i can craft my rare armor that gives my 3 needed stats for my build , OR i can make magic find.
Ive also bought the exotic armor for my build and saw that i can also make the exotic MF stuff. plese shed some light on this.

Question : When you use magic find , do you go with events or just go around killing things? and can you tell a difference from when you have your MF and when you dont.

I would like to know this as well; these last several days my drops have gone to almost 90% white junk drops, 8% blues and 2% greens. I’ve not seen a rare or exotic since last week.

So would dropping party effectiveness in favor of magic find help me?

Magic Find is an additional benefit that increases a players chance to receive rare loot drops and can be obtained in various forms, such as in WvW (outmanned bonus) Runes (most common) or Food.

It’s relatively easy to achieve magic find in excess of 100% with Superior Rune of the Pirate providing 50% and a range of food that also provides varying amounts (from 2% to 40%). In addition, there are also various Jewels that provide 4% increments.

There is very little data in regards to how effective it currently is but and from experience I would recommend (though this isn’t a cheap option) that you have 2 sets of armour. One for general PvE play while out in the game world or running dungeons, the second being one specific to competitive play (i.e WvW) or for when you have no care for securing loot.

What I would say is that you are undoubtedly better off having magic find when farming than to not have it.

To provide a description:

MF is a multiplier to the base drop rates of the monster or boss that you are currently fighting. If that enemy has a 1% chance to drop an Orange item and a 10% chance to drop a Yellow, if you had 200% Magic Find you would have twice the standard drop chance.
This would roughly see the above example become a 3% chance to drop an Orange item and a 30% chance for a Yellow. Where drop rates are obviously higher, these % will be significantly more favourable.

Unfortunately, where items have low drop rates (as little as 0.5% for example) Magic Find will make very little difference in the grand scheme of things.
I hope that clarifies.

Good luck!

Lewis Burnell.2493:

[…]If that enemy has a 1% chance to drop an Orange item and a 10% chance to drop a Yellow, if you had 200% Magic Find you would have twice the standard drop chance. […]

I think you meant thrice (i.e twice more than normal).

Eh? Thrice means 3

I have my MF set which I run around most of the time, killing stuff, gathering nodes (while killing stuff), and doing some events (while killing stuff and gathering nodes).

I crafted my desired set, but I don’t use it outside of dungeons, and rarely I equip it to try to solo some group events.

It’s kinda a bummer that I’m finding the MF set a must to have, to the point I’d even argue the game would be better without it… (so people would only use consumables and such, and their preferred armor)

I’ve tried both and I’m still torn, as it just doesnt seem to do anything for me except when mining.

As an example, having even a 5% chance of getting a good drop (with 100% magic find), versus having 6 pieces of armour and 5 pieces of jewlery give you a bonus to say crit damage, or another stat which helps kill mobs 25% faster, means I can kill 125 mobs to your 100, or 1250 mobs to your 1000. 2500 mobs, to your 2000. Which more then makes up for your extra 2.5% chance of something dropping. And even more so if I use food that increases power and precision vs magic find. I again, have a full set of magic find, and just don’t notice anything so…I put it on when I’m mining for a gem now and then and that’s the most use I get out of it. =(

If you can get 100% MF for the same budget of +25% dmg, you’re still better off with MF when farming, because statistically your chances doubled instead of going up only a quarter for the same item budget.

On top of that, given you won’t be able to chain up mobs that have a higher drop rate for the better items because of their unicity (champions etc.), making the best of those spikes is worth a lot more than killing trashy common packs faster, as the frequency of spikes is unchanged regardless of your dps.

MF has some worth over other things for a farming set because it costs less than damage required to kill a proportionally larger amount of mobs with no MF, and is even better because the high yield spiked in the farming curve are near constant regardless of damage.

Whether it actually DOES have an effect, or is bugged, or just doesn’t work that way, I don’t know because I’ve never tested it and am not at level cap anyway :p

There have been control tests conducted by Redditors… though i can’t link because i don’t want to open up my history.

Basically, it DOES help to wear a MF set, but not to the degree of double the loots…

the 1% normal drop with 100% MF = 2% drop rate its to an extent true, but also misleading…

the tests showed roughly the same “frequency” of drop, but a skew towards rarer drops. This means something like of 100 items:
50 white 30 blue 15 green 5 yellow
you might expect something like (making the numbers up)
35 white 35 blue 20 green 10 yellow

Anyone willing to scavenge up the Reddit post for OP?

P.S. regarding the “kill more, get the same” argument… in theory it’ll work better since you’ll get 200 of said items in my example and eventually get the same rares and lots more junk… but the beauty of MF comes in mob tagging. Keeping it on you at all times helps every little bit too. It’ll eventually boil down to “i’ll eventually kill as many as you did anyway and i’ll still net more rares”.

Regarding the “kill more get the same”, it’s also worth noting that apparently there’s a loot wall per area.
Anywhere between 50 and 100 mobs, or a combination of mobs and time, you simply stop getting gear in the drops.

This hasn’t been admitted to or confirmed by AN AFAIK, but pretty much any serious guild with coordinated farming sessions has found out that much at some point, Tales of Tyria podcast #48 actually has an interesting discussion about it. That makes MF more valuable if you don’t intend to zone swap frequently when farming.
This was the case until before the last patch, I have no idea if it was changed, but I’d be surprised if that was the case.

Also MF increases the chance to find more rare loot drops, WHEN you roll a drop that can be quality. This means you don’t get twice the items with 100%MF, you get the same number of items, but more will be quality items at the expense of less whites, which is what you’re talking about.

Blarrg.8305:

Eh? Thrice means 3

Yup, without magic find, you have a the standard chance, whatever it may be.

At 100%, you have twice that chance.

If you get to 200% via full MF gear, nourishment, food, guild flag buff, etc. You’ll have 3x the normal chance.

Good MF gear is pretty easy to obtain and is worth its weight in gold. Can buy Green armor off the TP for a silver or two with the same stats are Rare or Exotic (in terms of MF, other stats and armor will be lower, but PvE’s really easy anyway). I personally use a set of Rare MF armor I crafted myself. Accessories are also dirt cheap, Opal’s what you’re looking for. Got a full set for 15s on a weekend.

Overall:
Armor = 3%*6=18%
Runes = 60% (Can use 5x rune of the pirate and 1x rune of the traveler. 5x trav and 1x pirate’s arguably better but the other way’s much cheaper)
Omnomberry Bar = 30% and 40% more gold drops (There’s a +40% while under a boon, but I prefer the bars as a guardian)
Accessories = 15% (No back item with it AFAIK), stones in accessories = 18%
Magic Find Booster = 50% (Arguably useless with the loot cap, it costs a lot and lasts and hour so unless you’re zone swapping you’ll get loot capped. Personal preference)
Guild Banner = 25%

So that’s a total of 216%, or just over 3x the chance for rares. I think there are a few other bonuses I’m missing, and I’m deliberately leaving out Outmanned because that’s only for WvW. I’ve seen a post where it’s possible to get almost 300% or 4x drop. Either way, it’s a lot more money until you hit the anti-botting wall.