We have yet to get any solid information about exactly how magic find will work in Diablo III, but the loot system in co-op where each player only sees their own drops have raised some concerns in regards to MF. The original poster painted a scenario where a powerful character would do all the work and kill all the monsters while the other party members stack MF to increase their drop chances and sit back to collect the loot.
Official Blizzard Quote:
It's very likely that magic find (MF) will be restricted to very specific uses. It would work on a per player basis, so if I have some MF it would affect what drops I see and not yours. For the sake of co-op we don't ask that you damage an enemy to receive experience or drops, only that you're within a close proximity. Asking every player to damage an enemy in order to receive experience or loot encourages really disruptive behavior that undermines the intent of co-op. So the situation being described could be a problem, but...
As I said it's probably going to be fairly heavily restricted to specific sources and amounts. As an example, completely hypothetical, let's say that the only magic find available is from placing a diamond gem in a head slot. It's useful because of the amount it provides, but maybe other gems in a head slot provide things like bonus XP, bonus gold, etc. Then it's not a choice of power vs. MF and building characters around the system, but a choice between interesting bonuses that will probably change through the career of a character. Anyway, that's just a thought on how it could work. It's still under consideration. We like the idea of having some way to improve your chances to find magic items, but not as a driving statistic for characters.
It's also worth pointing out in this case that enemies in Diablo III are more sophisticated. You'll find them targeting characters in your group they perceive as weaker, keeping distance, and cooperating to try to kill you and your group. So having one person run ahead to face pull everything, let alone be able to solo everything in a multiplayer game, probably isn't going to work out too well.
While this tells us little about how MF will work and does not completely counter the potential for co-op MF abuse we do get some insight in the thoughts of the developers. They don't want the trade-off when picking up MF to be reduced battle power. Instead they want you to weigh MF against other similar type stats such as bonus XP, bonus gold or similar. Following this philosophy would mean that there should be almost no incentive to abuse the mechanics in the way described since stacking MF would not gimp your character in battle. If you can fight as well with MF as without then why would you want to stay out of combat?
Bashiok gave us some more interesting replies reinforcing what he stated in his first post:
Official Blizzard Quote:
Cacophony97: So there may or may not be a slot/gem combo that only does weird non-power related bonuses? Like, it can never have attack, precision, defense, etc, only MF, gold find, XP bonus?
Bashiok: We could potentially break gems out to more than just armor/weapon/shield, yeah.
Cacophony97: What about gem finding or rune finding?
Bashiok: It's been talked about (internally) a fair amount. We'll see.
The famous Ist rune from Diablo II.
Will we see something similar in Diablo III?
Will we see something similar in Diablo III?
With magic find and "MF-runs" being such a huge part of Diablo II players are curious about how it will be implemented in the third game. Read what the forum users have to say and join in on the discussion.
The second post was a clarification on how the skill tier system is designed. Bashiok explained why there's level restrictions put up if you can just respec later and pick only the higher tier skills:
Official Blizzard Quote:
Nice discussion. So yeah, skills are tiered out for progression. Not only as a reward as you level up, but also to ensure we're not dumping the entire game on a new player. Early tier skills tend to be cheap or free to cast, and have fairly straight forward mechanics and uses (do damage to enemies). As the tiers progress we introduce more complex systems, avoidance, mobility, maybe skills that cost a little more, or require a bit more finesse to pull off well. Then we get to the end of the tiers and these are usually the biggest, most expensive, and visually impressive. The tiers do start out simply and progress toward the bigger and 'cooler' spells. As they should. We can also design and tune the beginning of the game with the skills available in mind, which really helps to ensure those first few hours aren't frustrating.
Anyway, as I said, the end tier skills also tend to be the most expensive. While I'm sure there will be builds that take all the end tier skills, people will still need to pick skills throughout the tree to create a solid character, and we're designing the skills to ensure they can continue to be as viable as possible regardless of character level. Some first and second tier skills will scale really well and I don't doubt will be bread and butter for a number of builds.
Which, if the max level of 60 is still sticking around, would mean that around the time you hit level 30 you will have all your spells available to choose from.