Why is magic find so lackluster?

[Biff.5312]

> @"mtpelion.4562" said:

> If you buy one Mega Millions lottery ticket, you have a 1 in 302,000,000 chance of winning the jackpot.

> That is your "base Magic Find".

>

> If you buy 4 Mega Millions lottery tickets, you now have a 4 in 302,000,000 chance of winning the jackpot.

> This would be 400% Magic Find.

 

This is also a good lesson for people who buy multiple lottery tickets. Buying one on a lark is fine, but buying more than one is kind of silly, considering the increase in odds is negligible.

[zerorogue.9410]

> @"Zaklex.6308" said:

> > @"zerorogue.9410" said:

> > Magic find does not increase your chances in finding rare loot. Rather It reduces your chances of getting nothing from a drop roll. This in turn increases the drop rates of all other categories.

> >

> > EX: You have a 40% chance to get nothing and a 30% 20% 10% to get other items.

> > with a 100% magic find you instead get a 20% to get nothing and a 40% 27% 13% for other items.

> >

> > This of course makes more and more Mf less and less rewarding, and allows them to scale it up to infinity without anyone dropping exotics with every kill.

>

> That's not how it works, try turning that around...if you had a 1% chance of getting something before hand, with 200% MF now you have a 3% chance of getting that same item...that is how MF works, which is why you need such a large sample size to even do comparisons...see Illconceived Was Na's post above with the attached examples.

 

Think a little harder on that. If you have 20% out of 80% to get an item. Then you double it to 40%, then how can you then get a 120% chance to drop an item? You can't just add more %, you gotta take it from somewhere.

 

Also Quote Isiah Cartwright

> "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. This improves not just the rarity of the items you get but can also improve your chances at getting trophies and rare crafting materials like lodestones."

[Obtena.7952]

> @"Legendary Defender.5631" said:

> I constantly have 363% magic find from guild buffs and other buffs but I don't get any better drop then when I had 100% magic find. As matter as fact I got more rare and exotic drops at around 130-150% magic find then I do now. Now I rarely get rare drops maybe an exotic drop a month and very very rarely an ascended. I feel as if anet messed up in their math maybe or magic find was just a gimmick to get more money from players.

> EDIT: I forgot to mention that I am not the only player that has noticed this. Maybe if some of them can come in here and comment about their experiences.

 

Yes, you do, you just haven't done the stats to prove it to yourself. Luckily for you and me and everyone else, people have answered this years ago, lost and buried to the old forums

 

BTw, the answer was ... Magic Find works.

[Rezzet.3614]

1% drop rate x 360%= 3.6% drop rate

 

so yeah

[Ashen.2907]

Because we, some of us at least, tend to view drops in a binary manner. They are either junk tier (vendor trash or salvage fodder), or good (exotix, ascended, etc).

 

Magic find, according to this view of drops does two things:

 

It turns junk drops into another type of junk drop.

Or

It has a very small chance to cause a good drop.

 

Remember that tripling (200%) a chance at a good drop that, if rounded off to the nearest hundreth of a percent, is essentially zero results in a chance that still rounds down to zero.

 

So one of the two things that MF does might be viewed as nothing because of the perception that it is urning junk into different junk and the other thing it does can be viewd as nothing because multiplying zero generates zero.