I’m posting this because I noticed as I was playing HC most players had a very distorted view of MF and I wanted to share what I’ve learned before I left the game. I noticed some of the streamers were also fueling some myths for click bait builds. After losing several of my HC chars to defenseless disconnects, I decided to do some experiments in single player.
In HC I noticed a lot of players trading to get an excessive amount of MF. Some players would brag they are running 350%+. People with good gear were giving enormous wealth to squeeze out some more MF, such as near perfect MF roll items.
Here is the truth:
-your first 150% is critical and has an excellent return
-the next range of 150-200, depends, but for most builds its worth it
-200-250 is rarely worth it
-250+ its never worth it
How do I know? Well your actual wealth accumulation is based on 2 factors; MF and kill/quality of kill speed. So I tested both of these to the max to see if I could drastically change the rate of wealthy drops. I did that in single mode with some fudged gear that gave me 5,500 MF and a build that literally kills everything on screen in 8 player hell instantly. Then I could scale down the MF to find a sweet spot.
So the test with 5,500 MF really did not find as much loot as I was expecting and really isn’t much different than what you would find at 200 MF. Each zone you would typically find between 1-2 uniques, most of them junk. Your boss kills would typically turn up an elite/exceptional item of significance every 15-20 runs. So your biggest barrier was actually the quality of the item dropping so you actually had a chance to roll it as a set or unique. Hell is still littered with normal/exceptional items and even when you did get such a drop there was a very low chance it would be something of value. My guy is now 99 and I still never found any set or unique sacred armor, Windforce, Eaglehorn, and several others.
So in the end I found that MF was your biggest barrier up until about 200 MF, and then kill speed/players scale becomes your lowest hanging fruit after that mark but not for very long as those are all scaling vertically and my character couldn’t possible kill things any faster.
The real X factor to drastically increase your wealth comes from two things:
Scaling horizontally. Instead of having a single character with amazing gear & MF doing runs quickly, have multiple characters running 200 MF at the same time with a decent kill speed. This is the most effective way to drastically improve your high end drops. This is how I believe the online item sellers scale up their inventory. Tons of people in a room (or bots) using hundreds of accounts to find items and runes quicker than any of us single players can. Every account they add is increasing their chance to find a very good item by more than double; outweighing any possible MF or speed improvements you could possible make.
The second way to drastically scale your wealth is by farming ultra rare yellows/blues/eth sockets and trading them. Since most players want to run a nearly full inventory of charms and don’t want to invest the time to pick these up (due to their high fail rate), with the right mods they can get a king’s ransom as their existence is rarer than many of the uniques and runes. That doesn’t mean you pick up every blue/yellow you find. To do this effectively you need to memorize which items have a chance to pay out big and what is junk.
The same applies to HOTO vs lidless eye. You are more likely to find a lidless eye than a Vex.