Have, at times, exceeded 50% increased magic item drops and have not experienced any noticeable better drops.
Does the “increased magic item” actually work???
It works, but your chances really go from “awful” to “bad” even with like 400% MF. There’s diminishing returns on MF as well, so there’s a balance you’ve kinda gotta strike. It’s just the nature of this game though, the very low drop rates.
The drop rates in this game are very punishing. One of the slowest when it comes to this genre of video games.
Magic (blue) drops do increase linearly, as in, 100% MF means 2x as much things that would have dropped white will instead drop blue.
Rares, Sets and Uniques don’t have a linear curve. It flattens as it goes, i.e. there’s a diminishing return as MF is higher.
For Uniques, 100% MF is more like 1.5x chances.
For higher yeild farms like Hell Cows/Meph/Diablo/Baal you should start to notice something as you get closer to 200% MF. But it’s still flat probabilities. There’s no badluck protection. You can still feel like there’s dry spells.
MF doesn’t give you “better” items, it gives you more non-white items.
Also 50% is pretty mediocre, not gonna notice much. You needs upwards of 3-400% to really see a difference.
The odds of an item rolling a set/unique quality depends on a formula that takes ilvl and qlvl into account. So, a low quality item like Crystal Sword has a much better chance to roll unique than a Phase Blade.
It also means that a Shako dropped from Baal has better odds of rolling unique quality than a Shako dropped from Andariel.
For a desirable item to drop, it goes through multiple steps.
Let’s say you want a HoZ
- Monster dies and it rolls on a treasure class. It must roll the gear treasure class vs others like Good Treasure
- From the treasure class, it must roll Gilded Shield because this is the base for HoZ
- Pray hard that this is not ethereal
- Pray hard that it rolls unique (This is where your MF takes effect)
So there are multiple layers of RNG and your MF only applies to one of these layers. So even with relatively high MF %, you won’t notice much difference u less you grind A LOT.
youre dealing with small chances - 400% of something very small is still very small - just slightly less so.
0.038 becomes 0.152 for example → sure its better but its still not great 
you just gotta stop thinking and keep killing fast. youll have long series of days with nothing and then bursts of luck here and there. basically gambling.
MF is overrated in the sense that it is pointless to stack it and you’ll naturally get enough from much of your gear like from Shako, Tals set bonuses, Enigma, Occy, etc… just focus on getting good gear for quick clears + easy survivability and prepare for thousands upon thousands of runs.
Thanks for all of your replies. They are not encouraging, but they are enlightening.
Thanks again.
if you are hunting act boss like meph and baal
it seems that magic find around 300~400 in a single player game is the best
for Andy and Diablo, a lower mf seems to have a better drop
for duriel, mf below 100 is better
its my experience only.