Guild Wars 2

With each new patch it seems to change. At first being in level 80 gear all MF gear “explorer” all superior runes with the 1-5 bonuses “pirate” and eating the food that gives me 22% I thought I was set. Almost nothing drops half the time, most of the time I get blues. What’s even stranger is I get more drops blues/greens/rare/dyes from my simple 3 day 10% buff on my level 20 ranger then i do off of my 80 engineer with mf on every piece of armor even my weapons and accessories.

So I have to wonder, is this how this system was intended? Is this MF system broken? Should i be doing something special to make this work properly? I don’t understand how my level 20 with 10% gets more drops more often of higher quality then my 80 with 82%. (still getting the pieces together for jewelry.)

I believe it follows the same system as Diablo 3, which is…
Magic Find % is multiplied by the chance of that item to drop.

Say, a blue item has a 10% chance of dropping.

You have 50% magic find.

50% of 10% = 0.5 * 10% (or 0.5 * 0.1) = 0.05 or 5%.
0.05 + 0.1 = 0.15 = 15% chance of getting a blue item WITH Magic Find being calculated.

Of course, drop rates are a tad more complex than that, considering there are so many variables that are unknown unless access to the source is available.
Such numbers would be whether or not it’s a chance of getting an item —> rarity chance OR simply just chances of getting each item at each rarity.

I’m rambling and not making any sense anymore, but you get the point of Magic Find.

there is seriously something wrong tho, why is it that you get hardly anything at higher levels. Are the precentage calculations for higher levels that much out of reach for characters with 0% mf? Tonight i finished me set, it has 100% on the armor and weapons and jewelry, I even got the guild 3 day buff and the banner buff which set me at 120%, know what I got from an Orr run? 2 blues. defending a camp from 3 vets and hordes of attackers. There is something wrong with this big time. You know what i got on my ranger last time played him? 90% of my drops were blues, the rest were actually useful crafting items (which almost never drop in Orr btw for me) like bones claws blood etc, and I had 4 dyes. I haven’t had a single Rare drop since they did their last patch that supposedly only touched dye drop rates.

Perhaps you are running into the anti-farming system?

After killing the same type of mobs in the same area for a while, you will get less and less drops. It takes a break of at least 30 minutes to reset that, I think.

Cyrus.8261:

Perhaps you are running into the anti-farming system?

After killing the same type of mobs in the same area for a while, you will get less and less drops. It takes a break of at least 30 minutes to reset that, I think.

This and the fact that it’s all probability.

Example:
Random.org random numbers 1-10 10 times.
10, 9, 10, 8, 6, 1, 1, 1, 5, 2.
Each number has a 10% chance to appear, yet not all numbers appeared.

I have the sneaking suspicion that magic find lowers drop rates as well as increases drop quality. My ranger was getting more drop before I put MF armor on her. At the moment she still gets more drops than my fully MF geared out warrior, but I suspect that will change once I get her MF jewels.

MF works but most likely has some bugs.

If you would like to increase your drop rates, i recommend the following things:

1. Join a party, being in a party increases your drop rates since u have to do less dmg to each mob, your party members should be hitting the same mob. – I tested this several times and it works.

2. Use AOE dmg rather than single target, example: Rangers shld use Longbow barrage and 2nd wep set: Axe auto target bounces between enemies. Add traps to your build and drop them on spots where you know enemies will trigger, either spawn points or a place they will run through.
Other classes, figure out your AOE skills, Staff works good for guardians etc.
Bottom line, more mobs you tag with dmg, the higher chance of drops and more drops.

3. Dont farm same event multiple times, you will notice dimished karma returns and also lower drops after 3-4 runs. So try different events, diff maps etc.

4. Final suggestion ofc is MF. Drive your MF as far as you can.
No one is sure at this point if it increases number of drops, we know that it gives us a higher chance of rare drops but not necessarily higher number of drops.
To me i see a rare which can give me 1-3 ectos avg. 30s to be equal to 10 green drops.

So basically unless ANET confirms the true functionality of MF, we wont know but the above 4 steps will take you long ways.

Update: Ran a war run with my guild (basically it’s where many of us get together usually larger then a normal group size and run thru a zone getting all the wp poi hearts etc. We did this in the Shores last night. I was running with all MF gear on. I have everything mf on, which put me at 100%, we have the guild buff and the banner 20% and I had the food which boosted me up to 146%. In typical fashion, greys and whites were the only things dropping. I dropped my weapons for better handling of mobs to my dps weapons which dropped my % to 140, the moment i did that, suddenly blues were dropping off of everything it was like it was raining them. Then it stopped (we didn’t repeat anything mind you we kept moving to the next area). I then dropped a few more pieces of gear and picked up more of my DPS gear dropping me to about 50%. I had spent almost the entire evening running around in MF above 100%. The very moment I dropped it to 50% I got not one but two rares. By this time, the group was disbanding because we had been running all evening. I’m not sure how their calculations are working but apparently when you go above 50% the system puts a lockout or something on your drops in my experience so far. Anything below 50% seems to increase the frequency and quality of the drops. This is a very weird system.

perhaps its linked to your lvl vs the lvl of the content your doing. i know i seem to find much better stuff when im doing content that is higher than my lvl.