Magic find leeching?

[Raging_Zealot]

Re: Magic find leeching?

I still believe the best system to be the character that gets the kill, or possibly the character that does the highest percentage of damage to the monster, has their MF applied to everyone's drops. I think this will make it so it will be useless for there to be leaching chars that have high MF and no damage themselves. There MF would not be applied anyway, and thus it would be more productive for them to do as much damage as possible, to have their MF applied and thus get a chance at the best items possible. This would still allow a high level character with a balance of MF and damage output to help out others if he is willing to run through areas with little to no help.

It would however allow leachers to gain items/exp while not doing work, but that really comes back to what someone said on the first page, the player doing all the work has to be willing to be the only one doing the work. If they notice that going on, they leave. If they don't mind that others are getting their own drops, since them being in the game adds to their drop rate and exp, then they stay. I don't see a problem with this personally.

Also considering what was also said said about it being a poor game design (especially w/ the super powered items added in 1.10) that one player should even be able to do 100% of the killing in a game with multiple players in it. I agree with this, and hope this will be the case in Diablo III. If it isn't practical for the team to progress with only 1 person doing the work, then the problem will fix itself, in order to continue to kill and get items, the whole party must be contributing, and if it isn't people will not progress, new games with productive party members will be found. I don't really have a problem with this either.

Mythos had player specific drops, and I believe they were tied to the MF of who got the last hit, and the system worked well. It (and it is looking like Diablo III will as well) also was setup to where you could still get good items from normal monsters. In Diablo II, it is profitable item drop wise to run only bosses (yes I know there are areas of the game like the pit, tunnels and WS3 that have a high TC and thus even the normal monsters can drop well, these seem to be exceptions to the general rule of D2 though). My hope for Diablo III is that running through normal areas you encounter while doing quests and progressing through the game will be more comparatively profitable to boss runs. The first kill drop should be a bit fancier to give you a sense of accomplishment for defeating a boss, but the loot dropped from clearing the next available area should be good enough to compel you to do that rather than run the same boss over again.

Also early on it was said that there would be no buffs, I believe that was exaggerated slightly. The original issue in this thread was whether there would be fully support based classes possible (and how the drop mechanic would effect them if their builds made them unable to directly deal damage), and that was confirmed to be not the case, but that led to it being said that there would be no party buffs. We have already seen the Barb has at least one party buff, so there obviously are some. It will be similar to Diablo II in that all classes are capable of DPS (and with skill choice I suppose could handicap their character to being only support if they didn't get damage dealing skills), but I don't believe that rules out party buffs as well, there just wont be any character classes that ONLY have party buff skills available with limited damage output skills themselves.

 

[Kiroptus]

Re: Magic find leeching?

*sigh*

Look how much trouble the stupid MF mod is giving. Just remove this mod so people can focus on items that improve their character build rather than something that is the core of the game: Loot. Why the hell a loot based game needs a MF mod is beyond me.

 

[bbennett]

Re: Magic find leeching?

I think taking MF out of the game is the best option. My alternative would be to create tiers of MF depending on how many players are in your party. Therefore a party of 4 players has great cumulative MF than a party with 2 players. This encourages people to play together in teams and reduces the need for people to "wear MF gear" and stand in the background.

Blizzard could also implement another structure in the game to increase MF which has nothing to do with items, but deals with time and effort spent playing. For example the character would have internal MF which reaches milestones along the way and steps up. For example, a character kills 3000 baddies, the MF of the character jumps up from 0% to .05%. Next the character kills Act 1 boss for the first time, MF increases +.01%. As the game progresses more milestones are hit. A player kills 100,000 Act 5 hell baddies, +5%. Therefore the incentive is to play, kill and level. This reduces the need for using bad items with one mod and increases the incentive to party and play with higher levels.

Each characters internal MF could be geometrically averaged into the party's MF.

Added a way to divide up drops would work great with this system.

 

[isak viking]

Re: Magic find leeching?

*sigh*

Look how much trouble the stupid MF mod is giving. Just remove this mod so people can focus on items that improve their character build rather than something that is the core of the game: Loot. Why the hell a loot based game needs a MF mod is beyond me.

because its fun to belive that mf gear helps, and it does, so its good for you:thumbup: the only problem is that life is unfair, if u know magic like the wizard does, it should be alot easier to find magic gear, not ? dont worry, its going to be a killer game! :badteeth:

 

[isak viking]

Re: Magic find leeching?

I think taking MF out of the game is the best option. My alternative would be to create tiers of MF depending on how many players are in your party. Therefore a party of 4 players has great cumulative MF than a party with 2 players. This encourages people to play together in teams and reduces the need for people to "wear MF gear" and stand in the background.

Blizzard could also implement another structure in the game to increase MF which has nothing to do with items, but deals with time and effort spent playing. For example the character would have internal MF which reaches milestones along the way and steps up. For example, a character kills 3000 baddies, the MF of the character jumps up from 0% to .05%. Next the character kills Act 1 boss for the first time, MF increases +.01%. As the game progresses more milestones are hit. A player kills 100,000 Act 5 hell baddies, +5%. Therefore the incentive is to play, kill and level. This reduces the need for using bad items with one mod and increases the incentive to party and play with higher levels.

Each characters internal MF could be geometrically averaged into the party's MF.

Added a way to divide up drops would work great with this system.

i dont like any of those ideas.. first u wanna take out the mf gear, then give a mf bonus to people playing togehter? what about those without friends? and for the second idea or third.. about the milestones, it sounds okey i guess, even i dont care about anything of this, the only problem in d2 was if u didnt have good enough gear you couldnt beat hell difficult, or atleast come past duriel.. but i dont want to talk about mf-gear anymore, thats blizzards problem from now on, they even get paychecks for thinking about it. think about it

 

[Starving_Poet]

Re: Magic find leeching?

1) It overvalues instant damage. I am guessing there will be DoT skills in the game, that are probably powerful but take some seconds to kill the enemy. In a group setting, a DoT character would be getting no loot if there was an instant damage character running around whacking anything before the DoT's ticked for much damage. Note that it would also penalize slower skills like meteor and blizzard, which don't do damage immediately.

People that want the best items / period of time will always meta-game to achieve this goal no matter what rules, barriers you put in their way. There are also trade-offs - dot characters are better prepared to deal with large groups of enemies, versus high-damage single enemy attacks. In the long run, they would even out.

2) It discourages using debuffs and party buffs. We already know that some will be in the game in the form of time stop and terrify. However, because using these skills doesn't do damage, the person using them will be left out. Even if the person using them can get some damage in, a person using support skills + damage will never do nearly as much as someone who is taking advantage of the support skills but not doing any themselves. For example, take a conviction avenger paladin, paired up with a lightning fury javazon (in d2 terms). The convic paladin is enabling the javazon to do massive amounts of damage, but it is unlikely that he will be able to even attack anything before it's dead. Why should he get not loot?

You are operating on a large assumption that enemies and damage will be anywhere near as close to the high damage / versus low HP monsters that existed in D2. Bashiok has made is very clear they don't like that formula. They have also made it very that there won't be any support based characters. For the most part, aura's are a thing of the past. Diablo is a game about killing as many things as fast as possible, it's a simple dungeon crawler, it's just about as simple as games get. You can play outside the box, but as with all of life's choices, there are penalties.

3) It will be a strong strong incentive for cookie cutter play. It's one thing to do as much damage because you aren't playing the most uber build, but to get penalized in loot because you are not is just another thing altogether.

See #1 - this will happen no matter what. If there are 8 million possible builds, but there are 5 that outshine all the others, then you will see 99% of bnet playing those 5 builds.

4) for anything that isn't a boss, it is likely that the fastest character will get all the loot, because likely it isn't going to take a team effort to take down every solitary enemy.

If it doesn't take a team effort to take down a small enemy, then why should the team all get good items from killing said enemy.



See, you have to keep in mind that with player specific drops, you're creating players x as many drops in diablo 3 than you would have gotten in diablo 2. If you want any semblence of an economy, you have, HAVE, to tie item drops to player effort.

 

[5zigen]

Re: Magic find leeching?

People that want the best items / period of time will always meta-game to achieve this goal no matter what rules, barriers you put in their way. There are also trade-offs - dot characters are better prepared to deal with large groups of enemies, versus high-damage single enemy attacks. In the long run, they would even out.

So basically you are saying that because people will meta game it's fine to confine the multi player game to those builds? That seems extremely excessive to me.

And DoT characters don't deal with groups better, AoE characters deal with groups better, and as we have seen, barbarians have ton of AoE abilities, as do wizards. There are dots in locust swarm for example. You system would essentially nullify that locust swarm ability because the other players would do damage much faster so long as they could kill the enemy in a couple hits.

You are operating on a large assumption that enemies and damage will be anywhere near as close to the high damage / versus low HP monsters that existed in D2. Bashiok has made is very clear they don't like that formula. They have also made it very that there won't be any support based characters. For the most part, aura's are a thing of the past. Diablo is a game about killing as many things as fast as possible, it's a simple dungeon crawler, it's just about as simple as games get. You can play outside the box, but as with all of life's choices, there are penalties.

No, I'm operating on the assumption that it wont take a team of people focus firing a skeleton to take it down.

And yes, there are no support based CHARACTERS but there are support based SKILLS. We have already seen them. To deny their existence is silly. Why should blizzard discourage people from putting points into those skills? Why even include them at all? And how do you know "auras are a thing of the past" We have only seen 3/5ths of the characters.

We KNOW there is time stop. We KNOW there is terrify. We KNOW there is that barbarian skill. Now, this might be a "hasty" assumption, but my guess is that there are ways to increase damage aside from putting points into those skills.

See #1 - this will happen no matter what. If there are 8 million possible builds, but there are 5 that outshine all the others, then you will see 99% of bnet playing those 5 builds.


If it doesn't take a team effort to take down a small enemy, then why should the team all get good items from killing said enemy.

So in essence your argument is that because people will min max, blizzard should penalize those who do not want to? That is ridiculous.

See, you have to keep in mind that with player specific drops, you're creating players x as many drops in diablo 3 than you would have gotten in diablo 2. If you want any semblence of an economy, you have, HAVE, to tie item drops to player effort.

This seems like an extremely hasty conclusion. Chances are that the drop rate for each individual character will NOT be the same as it would with that player playing solo.

You don't HAVE to tie item drops to effort. You have to tie it to something else that is constant, or else you are just going to get the same situation as in D2 where everyone solos constantly, which is something they have said they did not like about D2.

If you tie it to effort you do nothing but encourage the most cookie cutter builds, discourage actual cooperative play (using support skills in any manner) and in the end you just have 4 people running around killing stuff on their own. More like 4 people playing in the same game than actually cooperating, which is something they have said they didn't like about D2 as well.

 

[jacobgold]

Re: Magic find leeching?

Poet, the idea of basing loot off of damage dealt sucks. A wall of text isn't going to change that.

 

[Krugar]

Re: Magic find leeching?

See, you have to keep in mind that with player specific drops, you're creating players x as many drops in diablo 3 than you would have gotten in diablo 2.

Not necessarily. We know nothing of the drop system in place for Diablo 3. It simply may not scale that way. It almost certainly will not.

If you want any semblence of an economy, you have, HAVE, to tie item drops to player effort.

Assuming drops would scale in a linear fashion to number of players? Maybe. But your premise may as well be wrong. Something you need to consider.

Besides, rewarding drops based on damage dealt will just introduce Loot Stealing into the game.

 

[CombatShrine]

Re: Magic find leeching?

*sigh*

Look how much trouble the stupid MF mod is giving. Just remove this mod so people can focus on items that improve their character build rather than something that is the core of the game: Loot. Why the hell a loot based game needs a MF mod is beyond me.

Thank God, someone is talking sense around here.

The MF modifier is bitter-tasting apple of discord. Just get rid of it!
Players should focus on turning their characters into killing machines; not jackpot levers.

The game should give you solid gear for making smart play choices and fighting effectively as a team - not for running the same area againandagainandagainandagain.

 

[SlechtWeerBeer]

Re: Magic find leeching?

If you remove the MF mod, either the drop rates have to go up, making rares, simply put, common, or you keep the low, low drop rates and make good Uniques so unique getting one yields $50+.

 

[Kiroptus]

Re: Magic find leeching?

Im sorry, since when the MF mod balanced the drop tables? It was there to unbalance it and screwing up PVM, and forcing MF-builds PVM to be casters that could gimp themselves using this mod.

Diablo is the only loot based game that I know that has this, since one of the main goals of the game is to gather items, you end up prefering MF over anything else when you should be prefering items that can boost your character's ability to kill and to be more effecient, most MF items went against this and the ones who could supply both needs (Like Shako and Enigma) ended up being the preferable choice of everyone and because of that there was no variation on best equipament.

The drop rates have to balanced, rare items must be a bit rare to find and unique items SHOULD be difficult to find. It was never THAT impossible to, for example, finding a windforce, such type of rarity is okay for the game what cant happen is something like the Zod rune, that is indeed wrong but no unique in D2, even with its loot tables, were so impossible to find to the point of claiming that the MF mod was necessary.

 

[jakotaco]

Re: Magic find leeching?

Don't know if anyone mentioned this, but we can't really be sure more players -> more drops. Maybe it is so that a set amount of items drop in total and then every item has a chance to be tagged as "player1 - loot" or "player2 - loot" or whatever. Would be quite silly (and indeed abusable) if a 8 player baal game resulted in every player getting their own full baal drop.

 

[jacobgold]

Re: Magic find leeching?

My beef with magic find is that the only reason for it to be prefered over other mods is because there are so few areas in the game you hunt for the items you want, so you must maximize your chances of getting those items per run.

Having any one area in the game droping worse loot than another area immediately makes that area "fly over" country. There is absolutely no reason to return. That is crap, and is the core reason magic find is used.

Now having various uniques associated with certain areas, acts, and difficulty levels but all being relatively equal (per difficulty level of course) yet different well... there you go. You can MF for specific items if you want, or you can be a killing and get equivalent items to trade for the one you want if it doesn't drop in your areas/acts.

 

[stillman]

Re: Magic find leeching?

^That's probably how I would want it. Some places/monsters tend to drop slightly more bows, other places drop more polearms, etc. That way, no part of the game would get completely ignored.

 

[sbn]

Re: Magic find leeching?

Im sorry, since when the MF mod balanced the drop tables? It was there to unbalance it and screwing up PVM, and forcing MF-builds PVM to be casters that could gimp themselves using this mod.

Diablo is the only loot based game that I know that has this, since one of the main goals of the game is to gather items, you end up prefering MF over anything else when you should be prefering items that can boost your character's ability to kill and to be more effecient, most MF items went against this and the ones who could supply both needs (Like Shako and Enigma) ended up being the preferable choice of everyone and because of that there was no variation on best equipament.

The drop rates have to balanced, rare items must be a bit rare to find and unique items SHOULD be difficult to find. It was never THAT impossible to, for example, finding a windforce, such type of rarity is okay for the game what cant happen is something like the Zod rune, that is indeed wrong but no unique in D2, even with its loot tables, were so impossible to find to the point of claiming that the MF mod was necessary.

I have to disagree with you here. First part OK, I agree that having MF items was almost a requirement. I would go further to say that because of the MF table it also required the use of certain characters over others. Hence why we have 90% Blizzard and Meteor sorcs at the begining of a ladder. Hence why Hammerdins are so popular. I am of the mind that MF should not be so item based.

Now the second part is where I disagree strongly. I have played this game off and on now since it was released. Picked it up on my way home the very first day. In all those years I have never found a lot of items. Uniques themselves may not be that rare to find, but quality ones are. Venom Lord's armor are dime a dozen, yet I have never actually seen a Windforce drop. There are in fact numerous items I have yet to see actually drop in any game, and numerous items I have never seen myself. Let us face how the game is really played now as it is; the vast majority of players (legit of course) use Hammerdin or Sorc decked out with high MF doing countless and mindless MF boss runs for that one rare drop.

This game D2 is an item specific game, I just wish it was not so darned item specific. Now one the one hand it was nice to see that shared drops was done away with. Hopefully people will no longer be so damned paranoid about losing a drop that we actually might see more social play online. But If the MF tables are again similar to D2, just as item specific gameplay, I expect we will see a new form of annoying play style. That being players who will completely max out their MF and just leech like mad because they have 0 killing ability.

This is just off the top of my head now as I write, but maybe a better alternative would be to have earned MF, just like experienced. More you play, the more MF % you get. Over time as you "grow" so does your chances to find items. THAT is how these types of games should be done. One guy can pick up the game and in a few weeks deck out in MF gear and find an item that a player without MF could never have found in years of play. There is something wrong with that scenario. I think D2 got way too damned item specific simply because:
1.) Items played too strong a role in character's development
2.) Lack of alternative "rewards" or interests after time as lack of fresh content makes the game stale or boring.

I am of the belief that the true and highest reward for an RPG game should not be an item dropped, but rather the development of the character.

 

[Kiroptus]

Re: Magic find leeching?

Well Blizzard does have to find a balance in the loot tables, I have found 2 windforces in my diablo playtime so I dont think they are impossible to find, I have yet to find the unique sky spirit for my druid.

What cant happen is to make items too easy to drop but we cant have the zod situation again. There SHOULD have items that are really rare to find, if people get anxiety problems because of that and need to loophole the game to dupe it then its their problem and blizzard has to track down dupes and eliminate it so the economy doesnt get destroyed like in present D2. I dont have anything against super rare items and I do believe they are necessary to create a hard to reach goal, there should be some mid level items to supply your needs.

But the MF mod has got to go, it already did enough damage to PVM builds.

 

[stillman]

Re: Magic find leeching?

But it's almost a given that mf won't go anywhere. Frankly, I don't think Blizzard has the cojones to take away beloved mf. I would like to see it go, or at least have a mode where it doesn't exist, and this would prove once and for all that good uniques do actually drop if you slaughter screenfuls of mosnters fast instead of focusing all your time on a boss or two. I never had problems getting rich in d2 just by using the AoE skills available. Even with zero mf, you get alot of 4os monarchs, archon plates, elite polearms, etc. Not to mention runes. People just don't seem to find anything from regular monsters because they aren't killing any regular monsters. They are skipping them in favor of bosses.

So since mf will almost certainly be in the game, the best we can hope for is that it won't take over people's minds like in d2.

Note: people complain about runes being too scarce too. But again, they are just killing 1-3 bosses in their games, and very few monsters, so it's no wonder. People should really try going back to killing regular monsters. You may be surprised at what you find.

 

[Kiroptus]

Re: Magic find leeching?

Frankly, I don't think Blizzard has the cojones to take away beloved mf.

They took out potions, PK, synergies, gave barbarian a diferent energy system, nerfed teleport (big plus here, highly beloved and abused by everyone) and are nerfing Town Portals... all huge and bold changes to the core gameplay but they wont have the guts to take out a miserable item mod as "% to Magic Find"?

 

[stillman]

Re: Magic find leeching?

I say that because mf was in the playable demo at the Blizcon. Those drastic changes were declared long ago too, giving me the impression that Blizzard thought long and hard about all that stuff and kept mf in even though they ditched a lot of other stuff. Of course, that was then, and there is always hope they will make more changes.

It seems the changes they told us about since then involved changing health globe appearance, inventory screen appearance, things that don't really take anything big away. I suppose the barbs 'traffic light' orb change was big, but it was just experimental and still subject to change. So that leaves me with the concern that mf is here to stay, and all they may do is tinker with it a bit.