Guild Wars 2

Okay, I purchased a full set of green Explorer Gear (Power/Precision/Magic Find %) for my Ranger including Accesories, Weapons, Runes and Sigils and food, and went off to Mount Maelstorm. I spent 1 Hour running around killing every living creature that walked or crawled, and in 1 hour I managed to get a handful of whites and 2 green items…to experiment I then went back to Lion’s Arch and switched out to my full Rare Carrion gear (Power/Vitality/Condition Damage) and went back to Mount Maelstorm…in 10 minutes I had twice the amount of greens and blues and materials as I had gathered in an hour…so can someone please explain to me how Magic Find works? Is it actually bugged with Condition Damge deaths? And is there any point in even using the stuff if the mechanic is that bugged? Becuase it just seems like it’s a waste of time and a broken mechanic at the minute!!!

Even with magic find, drops are still random. Magic find increases the chances of something dropping, but it’s still up to chance. It’s totally possible to go through a stretch of time with improved magic find and still get nothing because each monster you kill has an independent probability of dropping something nice. Just because you had this happen to you once, does not mean the entire magic find mechanic is bugged.

There is plenty of data that MF has a powerful impact on your drops, but it’s not the only factor.

Take the extreme example of Player A decked out in maximum magic find equipment and Player B using maximum DPS. In this unrealistic scenario, imagine that Player B’s build allows her to one-shot AOE all the baby spiders that pop-up in the area while Player A is only able to get credit for killing the toughest foes. Player B will get 5-10x more drops than Player in the same time period, including more opportunities for blues, greens, etc.

When deciding whether to go full MF, partial MF, or no-MF, you also have to consider how efficient your build is at tagging and killing foes and how effective you are in comparison to other players.

Finally, as Apocolyte discusses above, the law of averages doesn’t cover small bursts of activity. Player A (above) could get very lucky in any given run and get substantially more loot than a very unlucky Player B. However, every controlled experiment I’ve seen involving Magic Find shows that you get more of just above every type of loot (junk, mats, whites, blues, etc).

I could be bugged. Look at my post: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Monster-loot-as-lvl-80-vs-non-lvl-80-bugged/first#post607389