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.
As for the MF, I am really interested on how this will work. Assuming that the fix the economy, gold may become more valuable with crafting because then you have control over the items you are getting where MF could still drop you items you can't use. EXP boost may be worth the trade off too to help you get to higher levels sooner giving you access to more skills/traits earlier.
Now that they're redoing gold, I think that the market, in general, will be more accessible to people who aren't just MFers. Crafters will be able to purchase supplies in bulk, if they want, and gather a net profit. They won't be forced to trade wares for, say expensive items and then trade those. The gold is the happy, warm, fuzzy medium Very excited about gold!
Although adjusting your gear to give you better changes to drop certain stuff in D2 was possible, it was a pain and very hard to get right. I mean, if you wanted to, you could skimp all MF to get a higher chance to drop runes or white items, but beyond that, you couldn't really choose.
This could evolve into more defined markets for items that allow you to find specific types of items. Like, "oh, I need to look in to gear to find legendary/runes/gold" and there will be people specializing in crafting or finding/storing those specific items.
Oh yea. And its considerably easier when theres a base commodity to begin with, instead of having to have something turn into one (ie SoJ).
Also, and this is pure speculation, traits could favor lower level skills (ie a trait will at 15% damage to cleave while a different one only gives 10% damage to ww) in order to make lower level skills more viable. And higher level runes could be more of an increase for lower level skills.
It is also being thought out for how wizard can utilize first formed spell lines for survival. Allowing Wizard and other casters not force to bash around with a wooden bat through early dungeons up till the first boss.
Yeah, that.
I think we'll have to wait for beta to come along before making any assumptions about how commonly and in what way MF will appear. And even then Blizzard is likely to make adjustments before deciding on something. I'm liking the way they think about MF though. Although it was part of the MF-game in Diablo II that you in some cases had to weigh killing power vs MF on your gear. And that in itself does have its charm I still think what they are aiming for now is the right way to go. This way they keep the feel of control over your gear without diminishing your power/fun.
It really makes me juice up for everything that's coming out of D3.
For example, the extra gold would have to be a VERY(!!!) substantial bonus because with the prices magical items, especially armors usually have attached to them, the little extra gold you got out of monsters could not possibly balance the amount you got out of selling the stuff you found with MF. Overall, extra gold is inferior because MF gives you the chance to find good stuff for your toon, good stuff to sell for extra money or good stuff to break down. Extra gold gives you only the extra money, i.e. 1/3 of what possibilities MF can provide you with, though it does so more often.
Extra XP is a nice bonus (though I don't like the extra XP bonus for killing several monsters quickly). However, we know that characters will end the game at (or around) lvl 60, so extra XP will only make you flatline sooner, but will not provide your character with more power by the end of the game. Most likely, when you face the final boss at the end of Hell, XP bonus or not, you'll end up on the same level. Meaning effective benefit is only that you'll reach those levels a little bit sooner. Again, MF dominates here because it can actually make a difference on your end character.
Bottom line is, I personally find MF just too damn powerful even outside multiplayer. With multiplayer, it's an even bigger issue.
Also, it seems as though MF won't be that much more powerful in multiplayer as it will only help the drops of one person in the group. Obviously if you're playing with friends you can make it so that more drops for one, or a few people becomes more drops for the group as a whole if you share your loot, but it will still increase drops by the same amount as it would in singleplayer.
I personally like the extra XP bonuses as it encourages better and more efficient play as long as the bonuses are attached to good actions. But as I said before, MF won't neccessarily be the most powerful, and even if it is there will be a limited amount of tweaking required in order to balance it out. Compared to an XP bonus obviously MF will be more powerful in the endgame, but you could also use something like an XP bonus to make it so that you can skip a lot of content and still end on the same level, for example. Obviously thats speculation, as they could very well make it so that every quest requires the last one to be completed or something like that, but you get the point. Not to mention that MF doesn't seem to cover gem and rune drops, which are also very valuable, so if there was something that increased those percentages it could end up being just as powerful.
I like the idea as well, but I'm not so sure about the implications of it. Obviously, a more powerful/better trained character will be able to kill monsters quickly and most likely en masse, earning him ever more experience bonuses and giving him even more of a boost in power as he will jump in levels quickly, especially through Normal and beginning of Nightmare. A character that e.g. gets his most lethal skills by level 30 or is simply too much of a hybrid to be as effective as other builds will on the other hand lag behind. The result will be that strong characters will keep getting even stronger, while characters that lag behind will lag behind even more. This will keep creating more and more of a gap between the builds and will result in great differences in percieved difficulty. This promotes rushing through the game with cookie cutter builds and somewhat discourages innovative hybrid characters that sacrifice effectiveness for originality and unorthodox gaming style. Though hybrid char players usually do it for the challenge, you don't need the game mechanics to make the game potentially even harder for you (the game won't get harder, but in comparison, it will be getting easier for the strong chars thanks to the extra XP).
As far as discouraging innovation, I don't think that will be the case. The point of innovation is to find a good build that no one has thought of, but you can't really avoid there being some trial and error where sometimes you're using a bad build.
And did I mention that Skill Runes make it even better?
:pinch:
The gold you get from a magic or better item might be very low. The drops of gold might be higher to make up for this and with the increased percentage it may make a large impact. One mod I play for D2 Gold Find has a huge factor in the game much more than MF. In Zy-El I have gotten million gold drops from a monster and bought the need items for recipes to make better gear. A million gold in Zy-El is not very much since most things in that mod are very expensive. I would not necessary say that D3 should have an extreme amount of gold but it should be more than normal D2 especially if they want to base the economy on it.