I posted this on the Diablo 3 official forums, but did not receive much feedback.
First off, this thread is not about how fair or unfair magic gear swapping is. I just want to discuss one of the possible ramifications of nerfing gear swapping: the amount of viable farming spots.
Currently, there is only a small incentive to farm Act 2/3/4 over Act 1. A moderate amount of gear is needed to make farming Act 2 more effective than Act 1 while Act 3/4 require even better equipment to make it viable. But being able to gear swap keeps each act on par with each other since the magic find variable is held constant. If a magic gear swap nerf takes place without a change in drop rates, then farming Act 2/3/4 will become an unviable farming method for the majority of gamers.
Farming Act 1 with a magic find set already equipped is easy and not too expensive. The stat requirements are pretty low to clear it easily, thus negating the need to have magic find on equipment with high primary stats/vitality/all resistance/etc...But to successfully and effectively clear Act 2/3/4, one needs much more dps, all resistance, armor, and health. In order to clear Act 2/3/4 with any sort of substantial magic find gear, equipment costing tens of millions per part would be required. Now you may be saying that you can find plenty of items with decent stats and magic find; but by using less than great gear, farming later acts will be slower and thus less efficient than running through Act 1. This leaves a very small percent of the population able to Act 2/3/4 while the rest are confined to doing Act 1 clears or Butcher runs.
My possible fix to this issue would be either nerfing the drop rates in Act 1, buffing the drop rates in Act 3/4, or doing a little of both. By making Act 3/4 drop rates substantially better than Act 1, it would make farming those acts with low magic find just as viable as farming Act 1. Maybe even more viable. It also would not negatively impact those players who can afford great stats along with magic find because they would only be amplifying the much higher drop rates in Act 3/4.
If we assume that the average player can clear Act 1 with 200 mf(0 NV), Act 2 with 100 mf, and Act 3/4 with 0 mf, then the drop rates would need to be tweaked to where ilvl 63 drop rates in Act 3/4 would be roughly triple what they are now. This also benefits farming Act 3/4 with NV stacks because going from 0% mf to 75% mf is a much more effective than going from 200% mf to 275%, thus providing a bonus for farming much more difficult material.
A likely rebuttal to my argument would be that some people can already farm Act 3 in high magic find gear. But if a person can easily farm Act 3 in 200 mf gear, then they could likely farm Act 1 more effectively by using 300 mf equipment. The only people who would be unaffected by this issue would be those who either do not use any magic find gear at all and people who are able to farm later acts with close to the maximum magic find value.
Again, this thread is not meant to argue whether or not gear swapping is a valid strategy or not. You may completely disagree with me, and that is fine; but I believe that nerfing gear swapping with altering drop rates will make farming later acts completely unviable. If you think that I'm wrongly assessing the situation, I would be interested to hear your argument.
Not true. Right now, drop rates are balanced off of the hp ratios between acts. Monsters in act 3 have roughly 4x the hp of monsters in Act 1 and the drop rates reflect that ratio. But magic find is held constant between the two acts due to gear swapping. Once magic find is no longer constant, the drop rates will shift in favor of earlier acts.
I am not arguing about the mechanics of magic find in here. It is about the consequences of not re-balancing drop rates while changing the gear swap mechanic.
I wouldn't call it "Unintended Consequences" the game itself has to have some kind of progression, Act 3/4 being the "best" of places in the be-all-end-all of things.
You said "Act 3/4 not being a viable choice for the *majority of gamers*" meaning you realize that there is a point in which Act 3/4 is better once you've progressed to it, which is intended. This magic find fix makes it so that all of those people who are using Magic find on real gear that has real stats the benefit that they should of gotten in the first place, all of those people who are able to swap magic find in, shouldn't of been able to do that without having to invest in the real magic find pieces to begin with.
I get what you're saying. I'd argue that we farm Acts 3/4 for the challenge, not for guaranteed best loot. As long as everything is on similar grounds (which they will still be imho, similar not equal), I think it will be fine.
Honestly, this goes back to an issue I've been whining about in the past couple weeks: how "progressive Inferno" (instead of "flat Inferno") is detrimental to the farming game (and thus, to the end game).
I almost can't stand farming Act 1 anymore, and I'm starting to grow tired of Act 2, but since I spent quite a lot of gold on alternate characters, I don't have enough to upgrade to "roflstomp Acts 3/4 mode" (in order to properly farm it). So I'm probably stuck on farming 2 acts I'm bored with, and one of them (Act 1) is like playing Normal with a lvl 60 character that's one of the things they were trying to avoid with Inferno, and yet it's precisely what happened (I'm so disappointed)..
I will do a mathematical example to show what I mean.
Assuming 200 mf gives triple the amount of blue/yellow items and 50 mf gives 1.5x the amount of blues/yellows.
Pre-nerf: If you get 100 blue/yellow items while killing 100 elites in Act 1 with 0 mf, then you would receive 300 blues/yellows with 200 mf. Of those 300 blue/yellow items, 4% of them will be ilvl 63. Thus you would have 12 ilvl 63 magic items.
If you get 25 items while killing 25 elites in Act 3 with 0 mf(Due to 4x the amount of health), you would receive 75 blue/yellow items with 200 mf. Of those 75 blue/yellow items, 16% will be ilvl 63. Thus you would have 12 ilvl 63 blue/yellow items.
The drop rates are equal in this example since magic find is held constant between acts.
Post-nerf: If you get 25 items while killing 25 elites in Act 3 with 0 mf, you will get 37.5 blue/yellow items with 50 mf. of those 37.5 items, 16% will be ilvl 63. Thus you would have 6 ilvl 63 blue/yellow items, half of what you would get in the same amount of time killing with 200 mf in Act 1.
If you see a mathematical error, please let me know.
I think you didn't account for drops from chests/barrels/corpses.
Granted, MF doesn't affect those, but all the destructibles from Acts 3/4 have higher a chance of dropping ilvl 63, don't they? Would that be enough to even out the equation?
Honestly, I can't tell you the last time I found a blue or higher out of a barrel. Whatever they did to the environment in the last patch, they completely nerfed it into the ground.
Honestly, I can't tell you the last time I found a blue or higher out of a barrel. Whatever they did to the environment in the last patch, they completely nerfed it into the ground.
MF no longer contributes to loot gained from objects, it was in the patch notes.
I play no more than 12 hours per week and I have an MF set (~160% static) which allows me to farm Act III without a problem. If the majority of gamers rely on equipping crap gear at the last moment that they could never get away with using otherwise I don't really care. Being able to farm difficult content with high MF is not a right, it is a privilege.
I'm not saying it's a right. I'm saying that unless you farm Act 1 and Act 3 with equal magic find, Act 1 will always be more efficient. If you can farm Act 3 with 150 mf, you could probably easily farm Act 1 with 250 mf with some cheap upgrades. As I said in the original post, unless you farm with 0 magic find or the maximum magic find, farming earlier acts will be better for items.
Well yeah, it depends on how much you roll with, but have you done the math to account for the drop rate differences of iLvl 61+ items? For example, I prefer to farm Act III with lower MF than I could farm Act I with because I get more good drops. Over time, looking at a large set of data, is that really true? I don't know, but it feels like it is to me, and I am about damn tired of Act I at this point.
I would be interested to see the numbers here. At what point does less MF and higher iLvl drops overall become a better strategy?
Also... I found a 10m+ amulet last night in Act III... better than anything I've found in days upon days of Act I farming... so I may be a bit biased at the moment
While, changing X % here and Y drop rates across this act there seems like a decent thing to do,
BUT...
What most people AND Blizzard has to realize that Magic Swapping gear is not a requirement, it's a BEHAVIOR!
They are fighting a human behavior here, not a design design, not a balance, but the human condition itself.
Raising drop rates, making a larger flatter MF % across a a broader spectrume of the player bass, making NV better all raise yet equall out MF as a stat...making it worthless on gear...and the stat balancing on the gear worthless...
either keep it the way it is, or get rid of MF completely...Blizzard's digging a big hole here...they can almost get out of it
One thing that's simply not being taken into account here is the time, in seconds, between elite packs/bosses.
Once you hit around 30k damage, you really don't move faster through Act 1, but increasing your gear past that certainly does make you move through Acts 2, 3, and 4 faster. Like BigEd is more or less hinting at, there will be a point with your gear that Acts 2, then 3 & 4 come into their own.
Most people simply don't have the gear to support that, though. Many people DO have sufficient gear where Act 1 is totally faceroll, though.
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This is very true. MF helps with getting more magic and rare items instead of white, but it doesn't help item level.
Plus you have all those gauranteed rares with NV, which have much higher odds of being ilvl 63 in acts 3 or 4.
Onthe topic, this:
You said "Act 3/4 not being a viable choice for the *majority of gamers*" meaning you realize that there is a point in which Act 3/4 is better once you've progressed to it, which is intended. This magic find fix makes it so that all of those people who are using Magic find on real gear that has real stats the benefit that they should of gotten in the first place, all of those people who are able to swap magic find in, shouldn't of been able to do that without having to invest in the real magic find pieces to begin with.
TL;DR: Magic Find change fixes broken mechanics.
Honestly, this goes back to an issue I've been whining about in the past couple weeks: how "progressive Inferno" (instead of "flat Inferno") is detrimental to the farming game (and thus, to the end game).
I almost can't stand farming Act 1 anymore, and I'm starting to grow tired of Act 2, but since I spent quite a lot of gold on alternate characters, I don't have enough to upgrade to "roflstomp Acts 3/4 mode" (in order to properly farm it). So I'm probably stuck on farming 2 acts I'm bored with, and one of them (Act 1) is like playing Normal with a lvl 60 character that's one of the things they were trying to avoid with Inferno, and yet it's precisely what happened (I'm so disappointed)..
I will do a mathematical example to show what I mean.
Assuming 200 mf gives triple the amount of blue/yellow items and 50 mf gives 1.5x the amount of blues/yellows.
Pre-nerf:
If you get 100 blue/yellow items while killing 100 elites in Act 1 with 0 mf, then you would receive 300 blues/yellows with 200 mf. Of those 300 blue/yellow items, 4% of them will be ilvl 63. Thus you would have 12 ilvl 63 magic items.
If you get 25 items while killing 25 elites in Act 3 with 0 mf(Due to 4x the amount of health), you would receive 75 blue/yellow items with 200 mf. Of those 75 blue/yellow items, 16% will be ilvl 63. Thus you would have 12 ilvl 63 blue/yellow items.
The drop rates are equal in this example since magic find is held constant between acts.
Post-nerf:
If you get 25 items while killing 25 elites in Act 3 with 0 mf, you will get 37.5 blue/yellow items with 50 mf. of those 37.5 items, 16% will be ilvl 63. Thus you would have 6 ilvl 63 blue/yellow items, half of what you would get in the same amount of time killing with 200 mf in Act 1.
If you see a mathematical error, please let me know.
Granted, MF doesn't affect those, but all the destructibles from Acts 3/4 have higher a chance of dropping ilvl 63, don't they? Would that be enough to even out the equation?
MF no longer contributes to loot gained from objects, it was in the patch notes.
I would be interested to see the numbers here. At what point does less MF and higher iLvl drops overall become a better strategy?
Also... I found a 10m+ amulet last night in Act III... better than anything I've found in days upon days of Act I farming... so I may be a bit biased at the moment
BUT...
What most people AND Blizzard has to realize that Magic Swapping gear is not a requirement, it's a BEHAVIOR!
They are fighting a human behavior here, not a design design, not a balance, but the human condition itself.
Raising drop rates, making a larger flatter MF % across a a broader spectrume of the player bass, making NV better all raise yet equall out MF as a stat...making it worthless on gear...and the stat balancing on the gear worthless...
either keep it the way it is, or get rid of MF completely...Blizzard's digging a big hole here...they can almost get out of it
Once you hit around 30k damage, you really don't move faster through Act 1, but increasing your gear past that certainly does make you move through Acts 2, 3, and 4 faster. Like BigEd is more or less hinting at, there will be a point with your gear that Acts 2, then 3 & 4 come into their own.
Most people simply don't have the gear to support that, though. Many people DO have sufficient gear where Act 1 is totally faceroll, though.