Your basing your conclusions on a different point. You are saying because I can't kill thing as quickly in act 3 I should get more loot than act 1. I'm not taking time in as a factor. I am saying if you kill the same amount of packs in act 3 you should come up with more ilvl 63s. If you are in act 3 it will always be more efficient to farm act 1 because you will vastly out gear it. So should they nerf act 3 and 4 so that you can out gear it and be able to clear it as quickly as you can act 1?
Yes, if you kill 100 elites in Act 1 and 100 elites in Act 3, you will get a lot more items from Act 3. But I'm basing my theory on the hp ratio between acts. Act 3 has roughly 3.5x the amount of health of Act 1; therefore, you can assume that it takes 3.5x more time to kill elites in Act 3, leading to 3.5x less elites killed in an hour, two hours, etc...I'm looking at the amount of rares received per minute/hour/day/whatever.
Unless Blizzard increased drops on the later acts by the same ratio of health increases you will always get more drops from act 1 by the fact of being able to farm it quicker.
And that's the point I made in the original post. Unless they buff drop rates in Act 2/3/4, Act 1 will be the best farming spot by a substantial margin. I don't want to be stuck doing Act 1 or Act 2 goblins for maximum efficiency. I want to be able to do Whimsyshire/Act 3 at the same effectiveness as Act 1. You don't need to make those acts easier, but their drop rates need to be equal after the loss of magic find is figured into the equation.
Magic find is not working as intended. When it is no longer viable to swap out gear, magic find will be working as intended.
so you think swapping from main to 2nd weaponslot (like dual ali-baba) in d2 was not intended?
ofc it is working as intended..you can swap but you dont need to...you can get mf gear allowing you to farm a3/a4 without swapping or just go and ignore mf and only rely on nv. the problem we have right now is that ppl complain, that they NEED to swap to get maximum efficiency. blizzard feels they need to fix it (i dont understand why tbh). after reading the dev post about it, it looks very much like they will continue their way of "fix = nerf" as they did with multiple farm spots (goblins, champs & elites etc.), chests, barrels etc. which already made gf and mf much less valuable. it's an easy and simple solution, but it surely isn't the best.
swapping gear before a rare / champ kill is annyoing, i also refused to do it for a long time. but i don't want to get rid of this annoyance at the cost of its useability!!!
also i dont see the whole point about a1/250mf and a3/0mf or whatever farming..you (OP) confess your whole math is broken and wrong just for the sake of simplicity, but as someone already stated it is not simple and therefor you can't compare it the way you do.
i did some act 1 runs myself (farming act 3 in a 4-man group most of the time) and i agree with others that is very boring after some time (no challenge) and i dont see the point of using 300+ mf just to get more rares of which most are <ilvl60..it's your own choice, but i prefer to do act 3 and swap gear..and i got the feeling it's a lot more profitable (in terms of ivl) than act 1.
The math is a lot more complex, but the simplified version is a more exaggerated effect of the gear swapping nerf. The difference between Act 1 and Act 3 may not be as large as a linear equation makes it out to be, but Act 1 will be better than Act 3 without equal levels of magic find. Unless they revamp the drop tables again, Act 1 will be greater than or equal to Act 3 in every scenario.
so your saying the inrease in difficulty to farm the higher acts will require MUCH LESS magic find gear, because you need better survival/combat gear , and in the end it wont be worth it? =/
Magic find is not working as intended. When it is no longer viable to swap out gear, magic find will be working as intended.
This.
The current system is very flawed in my opinion, at the moment i can just open my inventory in act 3/4 before a kill and right click my mf healm, amulet and gain close to 90 mf, that is not a system that works as it should,
I have spent a lot of time and gold on barb MF gear that has str,vit,all res and MF, hopefully gear swapping will have consequences that will not make it worth while to swap.
It isn't supposed to be easy to farm act 3, its a game about gear progression, i can farm act 3 without to much problems with 140 base MF before NV buff as a barbarian, sure it took a lot of work gathering up the gear, but that is the whole point of the game.
Why should people be able to swap before killing blow without having to work on getting MF gear with actual stats and not just blue 20% pieces?
If it takes you 5 minutes to kill an elite pack in MF gear in act 3, then your not ready for it, my 2 cents.
This topic is not about the legitimacy of gear-swapping. If you can farm Act 3 with 140 mf, then you can easily farm Act 1 with 200-250 mf, resulting in more efficient farming,
For me (55k DPS WD) it's currently about the same in terms of gear per hour between my Act 1 farm (295 MF Warrior's Rest Farm) and my Act 3 farm (with gear swap). I share your concern about what will happen after they nerf gear swapping because all it will do is make my Act 3 farming even less efficient.
Do keep in mind that they said if they make a change they will do something to offset the nerf (Possibly more NV MF or something along those lines).
For me (55k DPS WD) it's currently about the same in terms of gear per hour between my Act 1 farm (295 MF Warrior's Rest Farm) and my Act 3 farm (with gear swap). I share your concern about what will happen after they nerf gear swapping because all it will do is make my Act 3 farming even less efficient.
Do keep in mind that they said if they make a change they will do something to offset the nerf (Possibly more NV MF or something along those lines).
Thank you for understanding the core issue. I did not know about Blizzard possibly off-setting the nerf because I make sure to stay far, far away from gear-swapping threads. I imagine that they all degenerate to flame wars(such as this one has) and I have better things to do than to sift through 700 pages of useless posts.
(1) your math is broken. With equal MF gear in both Acts, you will get close to the Blizzard provide drop rates over large samples. Your percentages listed earlier in the thread only apply with significant differences in MF - but .72% difference in iLvl 63 drops, which are the target, doesn't really support your theory. On 100 drops, 5 in A1 will be iLVL 63, with 4 in A3 of the same. Only on huge sample size does it become significant, only a rare small % actually farm enough to see that significant sample size in a shot enough time period.
(2) A1 is too easy. They should have adjusted this up, and well as A4 hell, to scale smoothly. A4 hell is too easy, and A1 Inferno significantly harder. By adjusting the difficulty scaling and drop rates here as well, A1 wouldn't become a cakewalk as quickly, making the minor disparity you call to attention insignificant.
(3) People should stop trying to qualify behavior outside the intended gameplay as indicative of poor game design. The issue here people exploiting a flaw in the game for their own benefit, then getting defensive about it. If the game had been perfect except for this, people would have still exploited t, and still been defensive, and still been posting these threads - because that's what people do. Stop trying to qualify poor behavior on players parts as a weakness on the developers.
As an aside - not all client-side programs can be determined by the warden program as malicious or exploitative. Many mouse-click and keyboard macroing apps can be used for many things, and disabling causes the loss of other valid features which are allowed. It means that any solution not specifically blocking the ability to swap gear in combat will make the solution fail - unless the solution is specifically to allow the behavior and balance MF a different way. Which still address the issue.
1) My original point was that the drop rates between Act 1 and Act 3 are equal with the same amounts of magic find. But this is only possible with gear-swapping in the game(good or bad).
2) Yes Act 1 is easy, maybe too easy. Making it harder would certainly alleviate the issue of unequal drop rates with different amounts of magic find. But that would severely harm the amount of people who complete Inferno. More people would just up and quit if they couldn't break through the Act 1 wall.
3/4) I don't know what that has to do with what I said in the first post.
I think a lot of the issue boils down to how jarring the difficulty increase is in acts. Act 1 i can faceroll, killing elite packs in 3-5 seconds usually, go into act 2 and its challenging... its doable, but whats the point? A slightly increased drop rate? I'd rather sacrafice some stats in act 1 by putting on MF gear(not swapping for a kill, just straight up swapping) so that i can still kill quickly and survive easily, not have repair bills from dying, and get almost equal drop rates thanks to MF gear i can equip in act 1 that i can't use in act 2.
I think a lot of the issue boils down to how jarring the difficulty increase is in acts. Act 1 i can faceroll, killing elite packs in 3-5 seconds usually, go into act 2 and its challenging... its doable, but whats the point? A slightly increased drop rate? I'd rather sacrafice some stats in act 1 by putting on MF gear(not swapping for a kill, just straight up swapping) so that i can still kill quickly and survive easily, not have repair bills from dying, and get almost equal drop rates thanks to MF gear i can equip in act 1 that i can't use in act 2.
You'd probably end up getting more high rares from Act 1 because of the magic find you equipped. As long as you didn't utterly nerf your dps in order to get magic find, the increased drop rates in Act 2 probably aren't enough to off-set the difference.
1) My original point was that the drop rates between Act 1 and Act 3 are equal with the same amounts of magic find. But this is only possible with gear-swapping in the game(good or bad).
Uhhh... what? Let's not confuse difficulty with impossibility. It is not anywhere near impossible to farm act III with a ton of MF, you just need MF gear with other useful stats. For example, I do it routinely with ~200% static MF on my best set of gear. It took a while to get that gear, but calling it "impossible" is ludicrous.
The impossible is referring to farming Act 3 with as much mf as Act1. Even if you can roll through Act 3 with 200 mf, you can swap out some gear to achieve 250-300 mf to farm Act 1. Unless you're near the max mf attainable, there will be a difference between acts.
The math is a lot more complex, but the simplified version is a more exaggerated effect of the gear swapping nerf. The difference between Act 1 and Act 3 may not be as large as a linear equation makes it out to be, but Act 1 will be better than Act 3 without equal levels of magic find. Unless they revamp the drop tables again, Act 1 will be greater than or equal to Act 3 in every scenario.
The current system is very flawed in my opinion, at the moment i can just open my inventory in act 3/4 before a kill and right click my mf healm, amulet and gain close to 90 mf, that is not a system that works as it should,
I have spent a lot of time and gold on barb MF gear that has str,vit,all res and MF, hopefully gear swapping will have consequences that will not make it worth while to swap.
It isn't supposed to be easy to farm act 3, its a game about gear progression, i can farm act 3 without to much problems with 140 base MF before NV buff as a barbarian, sure it took a lot of work gathering up the gear, but that is the whole point of the game.
Why should people be able to swap before killing blow without having to work on getting MF gear with actual stats and not just blue 20% pieces?
If it takes you 5 minutes to kill an elite pack in MF gear in act 3, then your not ready for it, my 2 cents.
Do keep in mind that they said if they make a change they will do something to offset the nerf (Possibly more NV MF or something along those lines).
Thank you for understanding the core issue. I did not know about Blizzard possibly off-setting the nerf because I make sure to stay far, far away from gear-swapping threads. I imagine that they all degenerate to flame wars(such as this one has) and I have better things to do than to sift through 700 pages of useless posts.
(1) your math is broken. With equal MF gear in both Acts, you will get close to the Blizzard provide drop rates over large samples. Your percentages listed earlier in the thread only apply with significant differences in MF - but .72% difference in iLvl 63 drops, which are the target, doesn't really support your theory. On 100 drops, 5 in A1 will be iLVL 63, with 4 in A3 of the same. Only on huge sample size does it become significant, only a rare small % actually farm enough to see that significant sample size in a shot enough time period.
(2) A1 is too easy. They should have adjusted this up, and well as A4 hell, to scale smoothly. A4 hell is too easy, and A1 Inferno significantly harder. By adjusting the difficulty scaling and drop rates here as well, A1 wouldn't become a cakewalk as quickly, making the minor disparity you call to attention insignificant.
(3) People should stop trying to qualify behavior outside the intended gameplay as indicative of poor game design. The issue here people exploiting a flaw in the game for their own benefit, then getting defensive about it. If the game had been perfect except for this, people would have still exploited t, and still been defensive, and still been posting these threads - because that's what people do. Stop trying to qualify poor behavior on players parts as a weakness on the developers.
As an aside - not all client-side programs can be determined by the warden program as malicious or exploitative. Many mouse-click and keyboard macroing apps can be used for many things, and disabling causes the loss of other valid features which are allowed. It means that any solution not specifically blocking the ability to swap gear in combat will make the solution fail - unless the solution is specifically to allow the behavior and balance MF a different way. Which still address the issue.
2) Yes Act 1 is easy, maybe too easy. Making it harder would certainly alleviate the issue of unequal drop rates with different amounts of magic find. But that would severely harm the amount of people who complete Inferno. More people would just up and quit if they couldn't break through the Act 1 wall.
3/4) I don't know what that has to do with what I said in the first post.
You'd probably end up getting more high rares from Act 1 because of the magic find you equipped. As long as you didn't utterly nerf your dps in order to get magic find, the increased drop rates in Act 2 probably aren't enough to off-set the difference.
Uhhh... what? Let's not confuse difficulty with impossibility. It is not anywhere near impossible to farm act III with a ton of MF, you just need MF gear with other useful stats. For example, I do it routinely with ~200% static MF on my best set of gear. It took a while to get that gear, but calling it "impossible" is ludicrous.