Guild Wars 2

It’s become clear to me that, despite having several characters with nearly maxed out gear and becoming very experienced in dungoneering and WvW, I have no idea how magic find works.

I’m looking for someone who can completely explain it to me, as simple or complex as it may be.

It’s been described to me as a modifier of the percentage chance of a creature to drops rare loot. For example, if a specific mob has a 3% chance of dropping one specific exotic sword and I have 200% magic find, does that mean that that mob now has a 9% chance for me?

Also, how does magic find affect the loot you get from champion bags?

Thanks for the help!

lets take 100% magic find as an example (cause it is an easy number).

Each foe has a loottable. This is basicly a list of things he can drop. The exact lists are unknown but imagine there are 2000 lines in the row. Some lines are empty (he drops nothing) some are junk items in them. Others are e.g. an exotic drop. The things that drop often (e.g. 10% change) have more entries on the list then the things that don’t drop often. When you kill a foe, a RNG (random number generator) generates a number. The game looks in the loottable for that line in the table and drops it for you.

Magic find increases the change of rarer items to drop. So with 100% magic find, the table is altered. the exotic item isn’t listed once, but twice. Doubling the change to drop it for you. This also means you have a lesser change of common materials to drop.

A notable issue when e.g. farming risen in cursed shore. The tier 6 mats drop from heavy molden bags. these are white (common) so uneffected by magic find. an increased change of getting a rare item means a decreased change of getting common items like these bags. So high magic find is actually a bad thing (do the decrease of drops of heavy molden bags is very minimal if even notable).

Magic find only works for drops from foes. So not for opening containers, like champion bags. However, in the case of champion bags, you might have noted there are different quality’s of the containers. You will have a higher change of getting an higher quality container.

tl;dr Yes, if a specific mob has a change of 3% of dropping one specifc exotic sword, 200% magic find will make that change 9%. Now to find a specific mob with that high a change. I think it is more like 0.03%.

Magic Find

mercury ranique.2170:

stuff

That’s not how it works. The wiki clearly explains that MF doesn’t make individual items drop like you describe.

AntiGw.9367:

mercury ranique.2170:

stuff

That’s not how it works. The wiki clearly explains that MF doesn’t make individual items drop like you describe.

Yes it does
‘“Everytime you kill a monster you roll on a number of tables, inside these tables are different rarity categories. Magic find increases the chances you will get higher categories. For example if there is a 1 in 10 category, and you have 200% magic find you will have 3/10 chances to get that category. This improves not just the rarity of the items you get but can also improve your chances at getting trophies and rare crafting materials like lodestones.”’

The only difference is that there are two RNG’s, the first for the category and the second for the exact item in that category. But I want to keep it explainable.

Stuff in CS also drops t6 directly …
Also while loot bags might be basic quality, it is worth keeping in mind that there is an even lower tier than basic.