Magic find

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Revision as of 23:14, 9 December 2012 by Flux (talk | contribs) (Additional Magic and Gold Find Bonuses)
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Magic Find, or MF, is a very popular magical property found on many types of items and as a bonus from Paragon levels and playing with a higher Monster Power setting. Magic Find boosts the odds that a character will find higher quality items, increasing your chances to find Legendaries, Sets, and Rares. Most players find a high Magic Find level highly-desireable and equipment with good stats + a Magic Find bonus is highly valued.

There have been many changes to Magic Find and the related item-hunting issues since Diablo III's release, and further changes are likely as the developers attempt to balance this property against player desires for good item finds and a greater need for a stable, balanced, and functional economy.


Magic Find in Diablo III

Magic Find increases the odds for found items (from monsters or objects) to be "higher quality". In descending order, higher quality items are legendary or set, rare, or magical. If a rare item drops, Magic Find increases the chances for it to spawn with more modifiers, giving it a better chance at higher stats. Thus the items found, with the least common (and thus highest quality) listed first:[1]

  • Legendary or Set item.
  • Rare item with 6 properties.
  • Rare item with 5 properties.
  • Rare item with 4 properties.
  • Rare item with 3 properties.
  • Rare item with 2 properties.
  • Rare item with 1 property.
  • Magical item.
Using the above example, when your roll ‘misses’ a higher-level item quality, the item generator proceeds to the next lowest item quality in the chain (in this case, checking to see if you got a 6-affix rare, then checking for a 5-affix rare, and so on). Your magic find bonus applies to each roll. If the same monster has a 10% chance to drop a 5-affix rare item and you have 50% magic find, you now have a 15% chance to get a 5-affix rare item.

Magic find does not boost the item level of an item drop; that is determined by various other factors, chiefly the monsters' level. (Mlvl is determined by factors including the area it spawns in, monster's type, whether it's a boss or a normal monster, the difficulty level, the Act, and your Monster Power setting.)


Maximum Magic Find

The highest possible Magic Find value has changed repeatedly since Diablo III's launch. Initially there was no maximum cap; players could benefit from as much Magic Find as they could achieve with equipment. The total amount of MF varied with patches, as the range of MF on items was tweaked and new/improved Legendary and Set items got larger MF bonuses.

Beginning with the v1.04 patch, the maximum possible magic find was capped at 300%, plus another 75% from 5 stacks of Nephalem Valor, for a grant total of 375% Magic Find. Patch v1.05 introduced the Monster Power system which makes additional changes to Magic Find, with some bonuses added for playing on higher Monster Power settings. Precise details about those bonus figures are yet to be determined and will be revealed with the v1.05 patch.


Additional Magic and Gold Find Bonuses

The highest possible magic find on Magical and Rare items:

Item Magic Find Gold Find
Amulets 45% 50%
Rings 20% (up to 30% Nagelring) 25%
Helms* 20% + 31% (socket) 25% + 31% (socket)
Shoulders 20% 25%
Chest 20% 25% (100% from Goldskin)
Belts 20% 25%
Boots 20% 25%
Bracers 20% 25%
Gloves 20% 25%
Pants 20% 25%
Shield/Offhand 20% 25%
Weapons** 45% (Legendary only) 50% (Legendary only)
  • * Helms can have 1 socket which can yield up to 31% Magic Find or Gold Find from a gem.
  • ** MF/GF affixes do not appear on weapons, but some legendary/set weapons feature Magic Find bonuses. See below.

Weapons with Magic or Gold Find

No Magical or Rare weapons can gain Magic Find. (Wirt's Original Leg is an odd partial exception.) A number of Set and Legendary items do have Magic and/or Gold Find though, and they are all listed below, by ascending Item Level. Most can be equipped on a Follower, for the standard 1/5th shared MF/GF bonus.

    • db The Executioner legendary ilvl 19 two-handed axe has 11-15% Magic Find. Barbarian, Monk, Witch Doctor, Wizard, and Enchantress only.
    • db Wirt's Original Leg (ilvl 22) has 6-10% Magic Find and 5-10% Gold Find.
    • db The Broken Staff legendary ilvl 48 two-handed staff has 16-20% Magic Find. Monk, Witch Doctor, Wizard, and Enchantress only.
    • db Blade of Prophecy, two-handed ilvl 56 Legendary sword grants 31-35% bonus to Magic Find and Gold Find. Barbarian, Wizard, Witch Doctor, Monk, and Enchantress only.
    • db The Gidbinn, ilvl 61 legendary Ceremonial Knife, has 31-35% Magic Find. Witch Doctor only.
    • db The Grand Vizier two-handed ilvl 63 Legendary staff provides 41-45% Magic Find and 41-50% Gold Find. Wizard, Witch Doctor, Monk, and Enchantress only.
    • db Sun Keeper legendary ilvl 63 mace has 41-45% Magic Find. This can be equipped by all five classes, as well as by the Templar or the Enchantress.


Legacy Legendary Weapons

Legacy items: A number of Set and Legendary items had Magic Find prior to v1.03, when their stats were reworked and the MF/GF was removed. These items are still functional, but can only be obtained via trading or the Auction House, since they no longer drop with their old Magic Find boosting stats. (Several of the above weapons had Magic and Gold find in their Legacy forms, but the new versions have higher values of those affixes.)


Legendary Armor with Magic or Gold Find

Legendary items will not roll Magic Find or Gold Find as random mods if they have those as inherent mods. (Though an item with MF can roll GF randomly, and vice versa.) Item Set bonuses are not limited in this way; for instance an item in a set that grants Magic Find can roll Magic Find as a random mod, providing that item does not have Magic Find as an inherent property.

Not all Legendary items have random mods; Goldskin for instance does not have any, so the 100% Gold Find bonus is all it can have; no Magic Find is possible.

Many legendary items listed are well below level 60, and thus can not roll with the largest random affixes. For instance, Aquila Cuirass is level 18, and can thus only roll up to 10% Gold Find as a random mod.


Legendary Amulets with Magic or Gold Find

Magical and Rare amulets can spawn with up to 40% Magic Find and 50% Gold Find.


Legendary Rings with Magic or Gold Find

Magical and Rare rings can spawn with up to 20% Magic Find and 25% Gold Find.

(Neither of the two rings in the Legacy of Wicked Dreams set has MF or GF in their inherent properties, but wearing them both grants 15% to MF and 15% to GF. Each can theoretically roll with 20MF/25GF from random affixes, giving a total of 55% MF and 65% GF, for the second largest potential Magic Find and largest Gold Find from any 2 rings.)


Legendary Helms with Magic or Gold Find

Magical and Rare helms can occur with up to 20% Magic Find and 25% Gold Find. Up to 31% to MF or GF can be added by socketing a Topaz or Emerald, making the head the largest possible item slot in terms of MF/GF bonus. Despite the large potential bonus from the socket, most players prefer to socket a Ruby for the +%experience gain, thus accelerating their passive MF/GF bonus from higher Paragon levels.


Legendary Shoulders with Magic or Gold Find

Magical and Rare shoulders can spawn with up to 20% Magic Find and 25% Gold Find.


Legendary Chests with Magic or Gold Find

Magical and Rare chests can spawn with up to 20% Magic Find and 25% Gold Find.

  • db Aquila Cuirass level 18 Legendary chest armor grants 7-8% Magic Find.
  • db Goldskin level 52 Legendary chest armor grants 100% Gold Find.
  • db Asheara's Guard ilvl 53 Legendary shoulders grant 13-14% Gold Find.
  • db Robes of the Rydaelm]] level 61 crafted Legendary chest armor grants 15-16% Magic Find.


Legendary Bracers with Magic or Gold Find

Magical and Rare bracers grant up to 20% Magic Find and 25% Gold Find.


Legendary Gloves with Magic Find

Magical and Rare gloves can spawn with up to 20% Magic Find and 25% Gold Find.


Legendary Belts with Magic or Gold Find

Magical and Rare belt can spawn with up to 20% Magic Find and 25% Gold Find.


Legendary Pants with Magic or Gold Find

Magical and Rare pants can spawn with up to 20% Magic Find and 25% Gold Find.


Legendary Boots with Magic or Gold Find

Magical and Rare boots can spawn with up to 20% Magic Find and 25% Gold Find.

  • db Lut Socks level 21 Legendary boots grant 8-9% Magic Find.


Legendary Shields with Magic or Gold Find

There are no legendary shields with any Magic Find or Gold Find bonuses. Magical and Rare shields can spawn with up to 20% Magic Find and 25% Gold Find, and those bonuses may appear on Legendary shields if they hit in the random bonus property.


Legendary Mojos with Magic or Gold Find

There are no legendary mojos with any Magic Find or Gold Find bonuses. Magical and Rare mojos can spawn with up to 20% Magic Find and 25% Gold Find, and those bonuses may appear on Legendary mojos if they hit in the random bonus property.


Legendary Orbs with Magic or Gold Find

There are no legendary orbs with any Magic Find or Gold Find bonuses. Magical and Rare mojos can spawn with up to 20% Magic Find and 25% Gold Find, and those bonuses may appear on Legendary orbs if they hit in the random bonus property.


Legendary Quivers with Magic or Gold Find

Magical and Rare can spawn with up to 20% Magic Find and 25% Gold Find. Random affixes can add to the inherent MF or GF on this Legendary item, resulting in a larger total than otherwise possible.


Set Bonuses Granting Magic Find and Gold Find

A number of item sets grant a partial or full set bonus to Magic Find and/or Gold Find. This is added on top of any other bonuses, including those to Magic or Gold Find from individual items in the set.

  • db Cain's Fate grants 10% to Magic Find when wearing 3 of the 4 items.
  • db Legacy of Wicked Dreams has two rings, neither of which have any MF or GF in their inherent properties, but both can roll up to 20/25 MF/GF randomly, and wearing both rings grants a 15MF/15GF set bonus, for a potential bonus of up to 55MF/65GF.

Magic Find Cap

Until v1.03, there was no maximum cap on Magic Find and players could reach 445% from equipment. Post v1.04, Magic Find and Gold Find are capped at 300% from equipment. The Fortune Shrine bonus will not exceed 300%. Nephalem Valor stacks and Monster Power bonuses add on top of this 300% though, with a maximum of 75% from 5 stacks and 250% from MP10 on Inferno. The maximum possible Magic/Gold Find is thus 625% in Inferno, and 475% on Normal/Nightmare/Hell.

  • The Fortune shrine grants a 25% Magic Find and Gold Find bonus for 120 seconds. (This bonus is included with the equipment base of 300%, thus a Fortune Shrine will provide no benefit to a character already at the maximum 300%.)
  • Each Paragon Level adds a passive 3% bonus to Magic Find and Gold Find. This means that players move steadily towards the maximum MF/GF cap with each Paragon level, until at the maximum level 100 no MF bonuses from equipment are required to reap the maximum MF/GF.
  • Each stack of Nephalem Valor adds 15% Magic and Gold find, up to a total bonus of 75% to MF/GF with the maximum at 5 stacks. This bonus is not affected by the maximum MF cap, and can be used to exceed 300%, up to a maximum of 375%.

Magic Find in Multiplayer Games

In the launch version of Diablo III, all players in the same game shared their averaged magic find. So if one character had 99% Magic Find and the other two had 0%, all three would get 33% during play.

While this system garnered majority support when announced,[2] it proved unpopular in practice and in Patch 1.0.4 the system was scrapped.[3] In v1.04 and later, there is no more MF sharing, so each character gets their full Magic Find bonus which is not improved or decreased by other characters in the game.

Given the developers' constant refrain of "do no harm to co-op," many players wondered why they didn't go with a hybrid system. Why not grant MF sharing to characters who could use it, while not lowering the total MF of characters who had more MF than the party average? The developers surely considered that permutation in their internal debates, but never gave any public reason for rejecting it.


Magic Find from Pets

Magic Find (and Gold Find) bonuses share from minions and Followers to the character, but only at a 20% rate.[4] Thus a Follower with 50% Magic Find would only grant 10% additional Magic Find bonus to the character. This shared value is subject to the 300% MF hard cap introduced in Patch 1.04, so your total MF will not exceed 300% even if your character has that much (or more) and your Follower adds some as well.

(This feature was bugged shortly after v1.04's launch, and MF rewarded from a follower could add to a player's 300% and the 75% they gained from Nephalem Valor stacks to exceed 375%.)[5]


Magic Find and Gear Switching

Diablo III did not include a Weapon Switch Hotkey, in an effort to prevent players from engaging in what the developers felt was an "exploitative" play style -- chiefly of switching from their normal damage weapon(s) to a weaker weapon/shield with high Magic Find just to get the last hit on bosses or to open chests. This design choice combined with the much-harder (than Diablo 2's Hell) Inferno difficulty level to create an interesting play style. Many players took to carrying full equipment sets of +Magic Find gear, usually everything but the weapon, which they would click into just before delivering the final hit to bosses, or before opening chests. This practice was a much bigger exploit, and seemed an impure tactic, requiring some game design change.

The developers floated a number of possible solutions,[6] none of which won a great deal of fan support.[7] CM Lylirra summed up the issue in early July, 2012.

There was some debate about Magic Find gear swapping before the game shipped. Some of our developers and testers thought it was fun way to game the system, while others felt it was too much of a hassle. In the end, we decided to allow gear swapping, thinking that the players who wanted to do it would, and the players who don’t enjoy the practice wouldn’t. Of course, what actually happened is that some players got caught in the crossfire — players who didn’t really enjoy gear swapping or want to carry around an extra set of MF gear all the time, but felt like they had to in order to be as efficient as possible.


So, when Wyatt says we “didn’t have a problem with it philosophically,” it means we were aware of the practice of gear swapping and understood that the player base had differing opinions on it, but didn’t want to make any changes to it unless the community asked for it outright (since we knew it was fun for a select group of players). It did not mean it was deliberately a practice we wanted to encourage everybody to do. Supporting and promoting gear swapping by adding a button would only complicate the current problem of players feeling like the they need to gear swap in order to be really efficient, even if they don’t enjoy it; it also increases the need for storage space (both server-side and in a player’s inventory) and adds complexity to a UI that’s otherwise designed to be very simple and straightforward.

The final system change was to do nothing to prevent gear swapping (though MF/GF bonuses were discounted when opening chests for some time) and instead to introduce an entirely new system that was built to allow all characters to basically run full Magic Find all the time, thus ultimately making gear swapping for MF gain irrelevant.


Diablo III's MF Philosophy

Pre-release, the D3 Team often talked about how they hoped to balance Magic Find with other modifiers, and how they'll keep things fair, or at least fairer, for all the characters. A typical quote came from Bashiok in December 2009.[8]

Bashiok: I think the trick with magic find, or any sort of tertiary stat that doesn't directly relate to player power, is to make sure that it's an actual trade off. A lot of times and specifically for certain classes in Diablo II you could stack magic find and still be perfectly able to fight and kill. So what it really comes down to is properly weighting stats on items and ensuring that if you do want to stack something like magic find, that it's clearly going to limit your power in downing enemies. Auto-stats to a degree also help out in this regard as you can't effectively stack stats as easily to offset the loss of stats coming from items that might otherwise help keep you alive or kill at an acceptable pace.

That said magic find isn't fully drawn up yet, there's not a complete pool of itemization where we can begin tweaking balance to a degree where we can ensure MF doesn't get out of hand. It could turn out that we need to take an alternate approach, but, if I had to guess simply weighting the stat properly would be enough.

To summarize, here's a bullet point list of reasons the developers offered to prevent players from loading up on nothing but Magic Find gear in Diablo III.

  • Auto-stat allocation means a character can't put every point into vitality to make up for not wearing any +hit point gear.
  • Item bonuses to stats like defense, resistance, damage reduction, and more, will be (more) necessary to survive than they were in D2.
  • D3 adds +%spell damage mods to numerous items, and Mage characters will need to boost that stat in the same way combat characters require +%damage weapons and other gear. If MF and +spell damage seldom appear on the same items, as was the case with +%damage and +MF in D2, then mages won't have any inherent advantage to loading up on MF gear.

Ultimately, these factors proved insufficient or irrelevant and players found that almost any equipment sacrifice was worth making in order to increase their Magic Find. This is part of what triggered the system changes that introduced the Paragon system and Nephalem Valor.


Pre-Release Controversy

Many fans disliked Magic Find in Diablo 2, and objected to its proposed presence in Diablo 3. The typical argument was that Magic Find only encouraged more use of Magic Find. Players had to wear gear with MF to find better items, and since many of the best items in Diablo II had Magic Find, they just increased a character's MF further, in a self-perpetuating cycle. Magic Find was also unbalanced, since spell-casting characters and ranged attackers could load up on it without suffering any real drawbacks, while melee fighters had to devote their gear to boosting their damage, defense, resistance, hit points, and other survival bonuses, and thus were at a disadvantage when it came to finding better gear.

On the other hand, many players loved Magic Find since it made finding better items possible, and those players enjoyed the challenge of balancing survival with higher Magic Find. For many builds in the late game, survival was fairly easy, and having MF to factor into the item game added a lot of fun. It also increased game difficulty, since Diablo 2 was too easy with all a character's equipment geared towards killing power. The temptation to add in MF gear and remove survival-boosting equipment was a nice trade off.


References