Just wondering how farming for items like rares and uniques is with little to no magic find and if you can be successful finding good loot… I’m in act 5 nightmare but feel a little undergeared and don’t have magic find gear but wanna try to farm Mephisto or Chaos runs finishing with Diablo to try to set myself up for hell.
There are two ways to get loot faster in this game:
1: Kill things faster.
2: Stack magic find.
Killing speed and survivability are most important. Add magic find wherever you can without sacrificing killing speed/survivability.
Magic find diminishing returns:
https://diablo2.diablowiki.net/images/9/97/Magic-find-diminishing-returns.jpg
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well , you always have to start somewhere.
just pick up an armor with 4 socket or a helm with 3 socket , topaz them for the time being , try to pick up some gloves or boots with mf without damaging your dps too much , and farm those 
i don’t have either shako , tal armor or war traveler , which might take a while to find as self loot , look at my discount version of them 
https://ibb.co/Yh3q4P3
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I’m sporting topaz armor/helm. Still wearing 24%/cold resist magic gloves.
Hell andy did drop some 39 travs for me though. 
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chance guards and goldwrap i do have though in my case , i got some extra of those if you want some 
cg for travs though , i’ve yet to find it (did find pretty much anything needed for javazon and smither though xD )
Already got an upped goldwrap. Thanks for the offer, but I’ll keep going self found for a while. 
nice
i upped mine too
Self found is indeed the good way master jedi
i’am quiet lucky runes wise though for some reasons , i’am almost under the impression HR drop rates been upped significantly…already found 3HR.
still can’t do enigma of course, but good god , i thought i would need 1 or 2 month to see my first HR and here i have 3 xD
edit : shenk just taunted me by dropped a blue shako + a yellow shako at once…bad shenk , bad xD
Step 1
- Magic Boots: ~15 MF
- Magic Gloves: ~15 MF
- Rare Rings: ~10% MF
- Rare Boots: ~25% MF
- Rare Gloves: ~25% MF
- Can buy magic items from vendor. May have to walk in and out of town until it spawns in the vendor’s list of items. Items occur more frequently in Act II vendor.
- Can make Charsi in Act 1 imbue your boots. Often grants run speed, which is good anyway.
- Can gamble, as a last resort. Has a very low chance, though, and is very costly.
It is not necessary to wear these items in Normal, but it is necessary to store them in your stash until you get to Nightmare. You might even look for these items in Nightmare, too.
Step 2
- Nagelring
- Wealth runeword
- Topaz
By now, you’ve probably run Countess, Andariel and Mephisto a few times in Nightmare.
Step 3
- Goldwrap
- Chance Guards
- Gheed’s Fortune
By now, you’ve probably run Andariel and Mephisto quite a lot, and probably even done Andariel and Mephisto in Hell a few times.
Step 4
- High-end Uniques, Runewords and Set Items.
- E.g. Oculus, Enigma, Tal Rasha
By now you almost strictly grind in Hell.
MF
165% to 185% MF
This is a nice sweet spot for grinding gear. You will get this MF by the time you’re in NM and have acquired e.g. Wealth runeword or a socketed armor full of Topaz.
Grind
- Normal
- Countess
- Nightmare
- Countess
- Andariel
- Mephisto
- Hell
- Andariel
- Mephisto
- Chaos Sanctuary
- Cow Level
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I heard 300 mf is the best spot to be at sometimes i get pretty good things sitting at 250% on swap though
I guess what I’m really trying to ask is if you farm Mephisto say 50 times with like 20 mf which is what I have opposed to 100+ what would be the difference, I never really put together a mf build in Lod so I’m not too sure how important it is.
well , let’s take the most common mephisto unique drop for nightmare mephisto :
Venomward.
It has 1/245 chance to loot solo with 0% mf
It has 1/208 chance to loot solo with 20% mf
It has 1/143 chance to loot solo with 100% mf
of course the rarer the item , the more potent / effective the mf will be ,but in worst case scenario it looks like that
it’s still doable of course , but mf makes it way more efficient as you can see.
i’ve done meph literally 500 times now hell rushes and still haven’t found Shako using 253% mf so far yeah, takes awhile still to find the good stuff got Stormshield on literally my 3rd drop though which is nice and HoZ recently with 4 bartucs, 4 Jalals, arreat, 2 thunderstroke and other goodies
Why would you need mf for countess or cow level?
You don’t need MF for Countess, but you can run Cow Level for both runes and items. The drop rate in Cow Level is 1 - (1 - x)n, where x is the item’s probability and n is the number of cows, which averages about 500 per Cow Level. That’s why it always dropped so many unique/set items in there in 1.09, and still does. Doing Cow Level is basically equal to doing Mephisto when it’s propped full of players. For many items, it’s even better than doing Mephisto.
https://i.imgur.com/SXdRLwR.jpg
To tack on to this and from another post I made over the weekend MF basically useless? - #74 by Talby-1633
You can get around the need for high magic find (or stack up it’s benefits) by playing in 8 player games.
clan/friends/community runs (not that they happen often because nobody wants their loot stolen)
of course , after all P8 gives by itself quiet the nice amount of loot.
And in P8, players with high mf are less likely to deliver the last hit anyway.(because high mf usually means less dps)
Magic find is mostly for solo (or duo / trio) in my opinion or to rush someone i guess.
(unless you can clear a room faster than any others sorc even with mf )
I have no hard proof of this, but between my friends and other people I have talked to about this all swear there is a ‘sweet spot’ for MF residing somewhere between 200-350% MF.
After that you will start to see a whole lot more blue drops, and its speculated that while the quality of what drops is better, those blue will ultimately lower your chances for stuff
one thing i do know as a fact, having 100% compared to zero MF is a MASSIVE upgrade and worth having it if you can gear it!
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The items that drop do not change based on the quality, is the quality that changes the item.
I don’t know exactly how it works but considering that the drop tables for everything in this game are so incredibly massive it’s likely done in a way thats like
Did you roll high enough for an armor → Now what slot → Now what type → Now what rarity.
There wouldn’t be any expected instances of a blue shield of whatever being rolled against a unique.
It would be the belt vs a helmet first, then the quality of the winner decided after, all the way down to available affixes on the item level when the loot was decided. Like a war belt wont upgrade itself to tal rasha’s belt.
If that made sense.
The 200-350% though is something I agree with based on gut feeling and IDK why I just feel less lucky the harder I try.
half correct as far as i know.
you will see indeed a lot more blue drops, because there will be less white item.
but there will still be more unique with 500% than with 200-350% (albeit not by much)
that being said there is a sweet spot in that area for another reasons : after 300-ish the mf get less and less efficient.
as you said there is a lot of difference between 0% and 100% , but less between 100 and 200 and so on.
300% ish is usually nice because it doesn’t impede your dps much while also allowing you nice mf
i personally like to go to 500% or more even if the difference isn’t huge, but simply because in solo most things tends to die very quickly even with high mf number.
but to be the most efficient in an all-around character for solo and multi , 300% is a nice number for that.
math hurts my tiny brain!
I am not the best at reading graphs and understanding scaling.
But I appreciate the clarification.
One thing I am constantly grateful for (especially since my gear isnt the best yet for MF) is that runes do not need MF to drop.