Magic find

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.

Diablo 2 introduced Magic Find as a property, though it functioned much differently in that game than in Diablo III.
- Refer to the Magic Find article in the Diablo II wiki for full details.

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 Find Bonuses

In addition to the Magic Find awarded by bonuses on equipment, other game systems can add to a character's Magic Find, up to the maximum cap.

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%.

The Fortune shrine grants a 25% Magic Find and Gold Find bonus for 120 seconds. (Multiple Fortune shrines do not stack, and the second one will just reset the timer to full duration.

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.

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