Guild Wars 2

I run a full set of Epic Explore’s armor, with 5x pirate 1x travelers. Travelers Ceremonial short bow, with sub sigil of luck, Travelers Scimitar with chest of traveler, Plus a full set of epic jewelry at 7+ per piece…. Basically adds up to 158% add Omni bars, for another 30%.

BUT

Finding it worthless. I get almost no drops. Most drops are whites. My guild mate, who has a few greens with a little magic (35%) constantly out drops me in the world, dungeons and pvp.

Feeling kind of cheated here. I spent a LONG time building this set to find it basically worthless.

I have hunch on whats happing, MF basically improves your loot by getting you higher on the loot table,
“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.”

while your chances of getting rarer loot is higher, the rare loot still has it’s own RNG

so your chance of rolling for the 0.001% rare drops increases but because your rolling on a really low drop rate alot more often will mean you get alot less loot..

but a higher chance of those really rare drops.

Diminishing returns?

think on 1-10
1= you have 1 in 1 chances to get a low drop
5= you have 5 in 10 chances to get a medium drop
10= you have 1 in 10 chances to get a rare drop

without MF you have a chance to roll any table 1-10

with high MF your only rolling 8-10 on the rarer drops
you have less overall drops because you are only rolling on much lower drop rates of the rares
and ignoring the low quality high drop rate tables..

hope thats clear.. is a nightmare to explain

It does make sense. But it still feels a little nerfed. As someone running 70G in gear for MF I’m consistently being out dropped $$$ wise by my friend that has literally 40 Silver worth of gear. It’s almost like I should back off the MF and keep it under 100 or something.

So firebreathz you think that there are 2 rolls. One roll to see what level of loot you might get then a second one to see if you get something from that level. And MF pushed the first roll higher, so you are more often making a second roll against the higher level loot?
So MF does not effect that second roll…
If this is the way that Anet are doing it then surely MF should effect both rolls to be worth having.

It would be lovely if someone from Anet would give us a hint at to how the mechanics of these things work.

This thread is a little old, but still relevant. I agree that MF is not working at all. I haven’t used it very long, but within an hour I can see I’m getting less drops than with my full necromancer set which only has +3MF (Ancient Karka Shell) for the entire build. My MF set, which I had really hoped would increase my already appalling drop rate, seems to be a complete waste. I’m going to run it for a week or so to see how thing go, but so far it’s certainly not hopeful.

Armor (+88)

• Full Jatoro Armor (Scavenger Runes replaced) +18
  • Superior Rune of the traveler X 5 +60
  • Superior Rune of the Pirate X 1 +10

Weapons (+18 with staff, +21 with Scepter/Dagger)

• Traveler’s Ceremonial Stave +3
  • Superior sigil of luck +15 at a full stack of 25
• Traveler’s Encrusted Scepter +3
  • Superior sigil of luck +15 at a full stack of 25
• Traveler’s Encrusted Dagger +3
  • Superior sigil of luck +15 at a full stack of 25

Trinkets (+42)

• Wayfarer’s Spineguard +3
  • Exquisite Opal Jewel +4
• Alpha Conduit +3
  • Exquisite Opal Jewel +4
• Ring of Blood +3
  • Exquisite Opal Jewel +4
• Ring of Blood +3
  • Exquisite Opal Jewel +4
• Vallog’s Demise +3
  • Exquisite Opal Jewel +4
• Ancient Karka Shell +3
  • Exquisite Opal Jewel +4

Total (Without any food or MF boosters)
With Staff 18 + 88 + 42 = +145
With Scepter/Dagger 21 + 88 + 42 = +148

I don’t buy in to the two tier thing because I got plenty of porous bones, whites and blues, certainly not less than with my normal armor. I did see noticeably less greens and T6 mats. To me it looks like the loot tables have been nerfed so bad that no amount of MF is going to improve drops. It seems especially so for certain users like myself, who seem to be in a perpetual loot funk.

If my drops don’t improve, AND stay improved, I really should demand my ~65G back from ArenaNet for false advertising. I even spent extra gold on armor and trinkets so that I didn’t completely gimp myself. It’s really sad that it’s come to this.

200% magic find of .1% is .3%.

Working as intended.

Ioflux.4369:

200% magic find of .1% is .3%.

Working as intended.

Exactly my point.

I’ve always wondered what anet considers “good loot” that mf increases the rate of.
I suspect “good loot” means anything not junk or white. POSSIBLY doesn’t include fine as well. they certainly include masterwork. I suspect it also includes things like unid dyes and fine crafting materials. It /should/ be anything found from these chests-the-mobs-drop. it definitely is not limited just to rare and exotic.
there is no way you’ll notice a change in rate over any time period less than 50 hours of playing. you’re just not going to find enough of these ‘good’ items to produce an accurate statistical measurement.

at the very minimum it effects blues, but im pretty sure it effects all loot.

which is why it not only increases the chance of rares but you get less rolls resulting in no loot at all.

the only problem with mf is the amount of people that think it means immediate and constant yellow+ drops when really its most effective for finding blues (specifically crafting mats) over longer periods.

In pretty much every online game I have ever played that has a random element, I have seen some people claim that it is not working properly. One cannot well back up such claims without huge sample sizes, however.

It also seems that usually when people makes these claims about some game, it is when something is working against their favor, rather than towards it.

I’m not saying that it could not possibly be bugged in some way, but these sorts of anecdotes are not very good evidence.

The problem is that people aren’t usually comparing apples to apples for runs. A full MF build has to drop some other stat, which means you will tend to kill less stuff and take longer to do it. That means fewer overall drops. For some, this will mean less total value.

The people who have published results using controlled tests did so by counting the number of times they got XP from a select few foes and totaling their loot and coin. In every case, those using 100% or more MF found more golds and greens, fewer whites and blues; more higher tier mats, fewer lower tier mats. Overall, the high-MF runs also had fewer items in total, but the total value of run was greatly increased.

For most players, this isn’t going to be enough to notice. I recommend that people only go full MF if they are committed to farming, rather than chasing events and if they can already clear their particular target foe quickly. For example, farming earth or air elementals for cores, as opposed to following one of the popular event chains.

Signet of Forums.4397:

In pretty much every online game I have ever played that has a random element, I have seen some people claim that it is not working properly. One cannot well back up such claims without huge sample sizes, however.

It also seems that usually when people makes these claims about some game, it is when something is working against their favor, rather than towards it.

I’m not saying that it could not possibly be bugged in some way, but these sorts of anecdotes are not very good evidence.

Indeed, very few people will report bugs that work in their favor. While I do plan to test with the armor for a good week or two, which will be plenty of a sample size, my problem with this part of the game is that is at first glace it appears to be so grossly ineffective that to call it magic find is an injustice. No, I’m not looking for cascades of yellows, I wouldn’t complain, but one every couple days might be nice.

As it stands, I’m looking at well over a week since I’ve seen a yellow that wasn’t some sort of essence. I’ve received about 30 little wooden chests, 2 rares (The ones mentioned last week), perhaps 5-6 greens, one putrid essence, everything else was blues or junk. I’ve done 20+ chest-giving boss events in the last few weeks…1 rare from the Claw of Jormag. This does eventually start to grind down one’s morale, when you know people who are getting rares nearly every event. This points to bad RNG and is a different issue.

I hate to tell you, but anecdotes are all we have. ANet hasn’t given us any solid information on how anything works, even after repeated requests. There used to be a means to export your combat log to a file, but they’ve removed that functionality. I’ve requested it be put back in so data analysts like me can easily access combat data and try to figure out why my drops are so bad while others consistently get good drops. Over time things should balance out…I’m probably 600 hours…is that not enough balancing time? All indications point to something changing last November, which ANet denies. All I can say about that is that GW2 is this single most stingiest game for loot I’ve ever played and that the loot problems started for me on or around the Karka event. I only stay around for the social factor. I was hoping MF gear would help with that, unfortunately early indications are not hopeful. Perhaps it is working as intended… 200% of 0 is still 0.

they have at one point stated that magic find doesn’t and isn’t supposed to work on chests (this doesnt include the new corpse loot chests which are just corpse loot fancified) there was also a brief post on how magic find effects drops, just without actual drop rates involved

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

The problem is that people aren’t usually comparing apples to apples for runs. A full MF build has to drop some other stat, which means you will tend to kill less stuff and take longer to do it. That means fewer overall drops. For some, this will mean less total value.

Agreed, but I was careful to choose items that made me more squishy and not a lot weaker, I sacrificed mostly vitality. My condition damage stat does fall from 1496 to 900 and something, but I offset this lost damage by using 3 minions instead of 1. Overall, I seem to be doing about the same damage, perhaps more even, but I have about 8000 less in my life pool. As I said, I’ll run the build for a week or two to give it a fair shake…and I do like the look of the armor. I’ll mix things up with events and farming…usually destroyers I’m after.

Dasorine.1964:

they have at one point stated that magic find doesn’t and isn’t supposed to work on chests (this doesnt include the new corpse loot chests which are just corpse loot fancified) there was also a brief post on how magic find effects drops, just without actual drop rates involved

I know…it was just ranting in the middle paragraph, more to illustrate that I’m not looking for the unreasonable.

Leamas.5803:

As it stands, I’m looking at well over a week since I’ve seen a yellow that wasn’t some sort of essence. I’ve received about 30 little wooden chests, 2 rares (The ones mentioned last week), perhaps 5-6 greens, one putrid essence, everything else was blues or junk. I’ve done 20+ chest-giving boss events in the last few weeks…1 rare from the Claw of Jormag. This does eventually start to grind down one’s morale, when you know people who are getting rares nearly every event. This points to bad RNG and is a different issue.

that’s why people claim mf doesn’t work when it does – the sample size is too low! if you normally find 3 rares but now you only find 1 in the same time, then it’s likely you wouldn’t of found any without mf, and it’d STILL be within the standard deviation. Get back to me when you normally would find 300 rares but now find x amount with 100+% mf. I’m not even joking on this number. 100 tests is the bare minimum I deem slightly acceptable. the higher above that you get, the more accurate. Ideally, we should be examples with 1,000 or 10,000+ tests. below that can only be considered a slight indication of the trend. (1 test = 1 thing you’re testing, such as how many rares drop) with the low drop rate, you’re just not going to see that many in less than a few months.
and mf does not affect chests. so any chest-giving boss events should not even be included or mentioned in your results.

Mystic.5934:

Leamas.5803:

As it stands, I’m looking at well over a week since I’ve seen a yellow that wasn’t some sort of essence. I’ve received about 30 little wooden chests, 2 rares (The ones mentioned last week), perhaps 5-6 greens, one putrid essence, everything else was blues or junk. I’ve done 20+ chest-giving boss events in the last few weeks…1 rare from the Claw of Jormag. This does eventually start to grind down one’s morale, when you know people who are getting rares nearly every event. This points to bad RNG and is a different issue.

that’s why people claim mf doesn’t work when it does – the sample size is too low! if you normally find 3 rares but now you only find 1 in the same time, then it’s likely you wouldn’t of found any without mf, and it’d STILL be within the standard deviation. Get back to me when you normally would find 300 rares but now find x amount with 100+% mf. I’m not even joking on this number. 100 tests is the bare minimum I deem slightly acceptable. the higher above that you get, the more accurate. Ideally, we should be examples with 1,000 or 10,000+ tests. below that can only be considered a slight indication of the trend. (1 test = 1 thing you’re testing, such as how many rares drop) with the low drop rate, you’re just not going to see that many in less than a few months.
and mf does not affect chests. so any chest-giving boss events should not even be included or mentioned in your results.

I know chests are not affected by magic find…I only mentioned them to illustrate just how incredibly bad my drops are and why I’m trying MF (Which I did not need before November). This should not be a hard concept to grasp. In open world, I literally have had less that 10 rares drop since the Karka event and 5 were within two days of each other shortly after the Jan 28th patch…that literally represents hundreds of hours of play with thousands of creatures killed since Lost Shores with very little reward. Even without MF, it should be starting to balance at that point, which it is not. As for sample size, your sample should be at least 10 times the size of the largest number the RNG can generate, so 1000 tests for an RNG{100}…even at that while it’s going to be linear at that point, it will still be a little erratic. However, overall, unless the RNG is obscenely large (Say 1:10000 or 1:100000), one should start seeing slightly better drops. At very large RNGs, saying 200% better is realistically no better at all and a placebo effect at best.

I, like many people I know who used to play GW2, will probably leave the game over the issue of loot, and only hang around now for the social factor. I often just stand around is some safe place, like a city, chatting. Many of those I know have just plain quit or moved on to other MMOs or back to other MMOs they used to play, while others I know have gone back to GW1. Now, I don’t need the money, have map completion and with my drop rate have given up on the idea of a legendary, or even ascended gear, there is no real end-game in GW2 beyond what I have, so to speak, what’s left other than amassing wealth? Perpetually crappy drops and MF that, even by your own description, is so ineffective that it will potentially takes months to notice the difference, will not keep people in the game. I have no problem spending money in the gem store and have, but if ANet is going to try to force me by making drops so bad that I can’t feasibly level an alt in appropriate gear without spending real money, then I will simply not do it. I don’t want to buy an alt.

Loot-wise, the game is very unrewarding and more importantly, is not the same “no grind” game I purchased last summer, which is the most frustrating part of all. With a couple BIG MMO entries coming out this year, ArenaNet better get their act together or they will suffer the same fate as TOR and D3.

I’ll concede that MF is working as intended, just that it’s essentially useless, like most things related to loot these days. I’ll not comment on this topic again.

In my case the MF does not realy seems like it is worth it at the moment, been playing alot with the wife lately, both necromancer and almost always hits the same targets, we get simulary loot (it seems like she get a bit more rare) i always have around 200 % and she is running with around 50 %.
We did a test today on 1 hour killing 250 mobs on the Cursed shore, we both got 1 rare and the rest was almost the same (she did get 12 more Heavy Moldy Bags than me).
My magic find during the test was 304 % and hers was 15 %, small test but seems to confirm what we have been noticing the past month or so.

Maybe system saw a leecher in the dungeon party and reduce your drop ?

Don’t use magic find armor, then. There, problem solved.

The test was not done in a dungeon, we where the only 2 in the party and do aprox the same damage, to make sure those factors did not affect the end result

Killing 250 mobs within 1 hour does not prove anything. The amount of drops is just too little to compare. Doing this for a few weeks with several thousand drops would help us. Right now we are just comparing small amounts (1 rare – 1 rare).

Without reading this entire thread, keep in mind that being in a group of 3 or more helps the loot drops far more than any gear you could possibly put together ever will… And also keep in mind that you should not expect to be rolling in drops if you are farming orrian zergs on a character who doesn’t put out some decent aoe spike damage because of how fast the things tend to die and the way the system accredits participation in a kill for drops, quest/event credit, etc… The “tagging mechanic” that Anet says doesn’t exist actually doesn’t, the apparent effects are caused by the way the participation and shared credit system works.

SO, for best results in loot off raw kills:
1) Group up
2) Try to choose a farming character who can spike AoE dps hard, and repeatedly as much as possible
3) Magic find gear doesn’t hurt, but as undoubtedly stated, 200% better chance on a 1/100 drop is still only 3/100, and while the numbers look large, it all depends on what it is you are after.
4) Remember you are still dealing with something probably resembling a random number generator, and if they hate you like they hate me, my best stuff comes only when I’m partnered with someone even more cursed by the fates than myself, otherwise I’m the only fool in the party who doesn’t walk out a “sure bet farm” with something to show for the time (and frequently the $%!%(@#$&s I’m with get 3 or 4 of the target items and call it quits before I even have 1) because that’s how RNGs work -.-

A couple of weeks ago I set myself up with a MF armor set to test the difference for myself. From having no bonuses to having +168% (after food) here are my impressions:

1) I agree that chests seem to be unaffected. I didn’t know that until reading this post, but it was pretty obvious over several dozen dragons that the average chest take was the same. I keep fair records of the list value of the items, and the average didn’t shift.

2) I still get plenty enough “low-end” drops, so I don’t see that MF gets you beyond that. Maybe it just lowers your chances of the low-end. I did end up with fewer junk items, but it would take more than a couple of weeks to verify this is as intended.

3) My drop rate of greens went much higher. I was only getting 1 green a day at best before changing, and within 10 minutes of the change I had looted 3 greens. Since then I’ve continued to see loads of greens. Too bad greens are virtually worthless these days. Still, the vendor value is higher than what I’d been getting.

4) I haven’t seen any change in regards to anything higher than greens. In other words, while I was getting zero rares or exotics, I am still getting zero rares or exotics. Two weeks might not be enough time to tell, but since I’ve never gotten either outside of dragon chests, I have no basis for knowing anything about the rare and exotic impact.

Hope that all helps. I’m interested to see how the recent fix will impact perceptions, since apparently some folks had bugged loot tables anyway. Maybe that was contributing to the apparent lack of MF effectiveness?

See, here is the problem with anecdotes: I get some item that is worth at least 30 silver probably at least every other time I do a dungeon, and quite often I get an exotic that is worth a gold or more.

Here is another problem with this particular anecdote: Regardless of what one might conclude about drop rates from this (such as that the chances of getting a rare are probably greater than one in a trillion ), it still clearly does not indicate anything about magic find whatsoever.

Blackhat.4016:

Killing 250 mobs within 1 hour does not prove anything. The amount of drops is just too little to compare. Doing this for a few weeks with several thousand drops would help us. Right now we are just comparing small amounts (1 rare – 1 rare).

Yes, that is too small a sample size. Also, people need to give exact numbers of whites, blues, greens, yellows, and (should they be so fortunate) oranges, and not just cherry-pick whatever thing they decide to look at to illustrate their point. Ideally, both runs would be killing the exact same enemies, of course. I know that is not entirely practical, but that is the ideal.

Reopening a dead topic (I know)

After having 3 months of a trollface RNG at 4% less magic find than the possible maximum I can safely say that Magic Find is broken beyond comparison.

Instead of counting every white/blue/green etc drop, I made a percentage calculation on 100 inventory slots (full bags) worth of loot.
At roughly 25000 drops in 3 months doing Personal Story, Dungeons, Events, farming across the maps both high and low level, these are the statistics, rounded at 0.5%, not counting rares from daily boss chests or ANY chest for that matter:

Trophies, materials and salvageables:
17.5%
White:
9%
Blue:
40.5%
Green:
30.5%
Yellow:
1.5%
Orange:
less than 0.5%
Orange-named:
less than 0.5%

There has been NO NOTABLE difference between a character that was full DPS, Tank-Support, Conditionspecced, with or without Magic Find.
However it APPEARED that my tank-support guardian without 20% magic find was getting an average 1 rare extra per 300-400 drops than my engineer with the almost full Magic Find set.

Roughly 70-75% of the time I have played solely with Magic Find gear on including buffs from guild, banners etc. and a bonfire if present.
The amount of exotics I got in these past few months can be count on fingers and toes. It simply cannot be intended that some players get an exotic every hour and others are shocked if they ever find one.

That is what makes this even worse: some players get exotics like rain in hurricaneseason while others are praying for it in the Saharasun…

Either magic find is broken, RNG has faulty values in its code, or something even worse is at work here.

I love the game, having spent over 1700 hours since launch ingame, loving new content and everything already there… But the fun is slowly dying with all the rares and exotics I see others ping in mapchat, or worse, having a partymember snatching 10 rares in a single fractalrun + a lovely endchest while having to enjoy my few silvers I earned and yet again no exotic drops…

Welcome to my world. 2245 hours, and I’ve got half a dozen of exotic drops from mobs, plus roughly a dozen more out of dragon and fractals chests. Also, a dozen of lodestones in 2k hours of game. While EVERY-SINGLE-BODY with 500 hours has got at least as many (most more) drop than me. Comparatively, it long passed the time where it was stadistic bad luck, passed the time when it became a stadistic anomally, and now it’s simply a joke.
You know what happens when you play that much, and the game rewards your efforts with absolute bullkitten? That you start looking for other games. I’m checking on Forgotten Realms, while Elder Scrolls comes up. As soon as one of those two gets a good working level, bye bye gw2.