Magic Find Gear Swapping
Blizzard has just posted a blog dealing with the issue of switching to high MF gear right before a kill. In the article five options are given and Blizzard will be looking for any and all feedback on the issue at hand. It should also be noted that with these they will also be looking at ways to add more MF bonuses to compensate for any changes.
- Set a Magic Find Cap
- Slowly Adjust Magic Find Over Time
- Use your average MF% or your lowest MF% of the last 5 minutes
- Zero-Out Your MF% for 3 Minutes After Swapping Gear
- Gear Swapping Interacts with Nephalem Valor
Originally Posted by Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
(Since release it has become an increasingly common practice to keep a Magic Find (MF) set in your inventory, and swap it in shortly before a kill. Philosophically we don't have a problem with the practice. While players getting more Magic Find for their kills isn't a game breaker for us, many players have said they don't enjoy doing it but feel the benefit is too large to ignore. Since the call for a solution really comes from all of you, we'd like to invite you to chime in with your opinion on what the solution could be.
It's worth keeping in mind that if we do implement a method to alleviate gear-swapping in combat, we'll simultaneously be looking at ways for players to get an added MF bonus to compensate.
Here are the solutions we're currently considering, and would appreciate your feedback and opinion on what seems the most reasonable for you, and why:
Option 1: Set a Magic Find Cap
We could set an MF cap between something like 100% and 200%. Nephalem Valor provides 75%, so you would need between 25% and 125% to reach the hard cap. Everyone could find ways to hit the cap for MF% on their gear and then stop.
Pros: Creates a gearing-game around trying to hit the "MF% cap" that some players enjoy. It also solves the swapping issue for people with enough gear to hit the cap. Players who want to min-max and gear swap can do so, and players who think it's stupid but feel "compelled" can try to hit the new cap instead.
Cons: Depending on where the cap is set, it may not actually alleviate gear swapping, and players who wish they didn't have to will feel compelled to do so. It also devalues a highly valuable stat, and desired stats mean desired gear, which helps diversify the item hunt.
Option 2: Slowly Adjust Magic Find Over Time
When you equip an item with Magic Find, we don't let your MF% change right away. Instead your Magic Find slowly "drifts" towards the target Magic Find -- potentially something like 1% every 3 seconds. If you open up your Character Details sheet, you can see the number change "8%... 9%... 10%." Even though you could in theory switch to Magic Find gear for the killing blow and get a few extra percent, it�s probably not worth it.
Pros: High degree of visibility as your stat sheet updates. Still allows you to swap your gear when you get an upgrade in the world without having to feel bad about putting the item on.
Cons: May not alleviate the problem for players who still feel compelled to get a few extra MF%. Depending on the rate, some players may just swap in an item during the last 20 seconds of a fight even though they don't want to.
Option 3: Use your average MF% or your lowest MF% of the last 5 minutes
We could sample your MF% every 30 seconds or so and create a moving average, or use the lowest MF% the game has seen on your character in the last few minutes.
Pros: A lot of the same benefits as Solution 2, but harder to game. Still allows you to switch gear when you get an upgrade, which is great.
Cons: Difficult to communicate. We'd have to communicate this on the Details page somehow, but during normal gameplay there could be the sense of not knowing what your "moving average" is and wanting to look at it. Magic Find is already a difficult number to feel at any point in time, so hidden rules that modify Magic Find feel that much worse.
Option 4: Zero-Out Your MF% for 3 Minutes After Swapping Gear
When you swap gear, your Magic Find is disabled for 3 minutes.
Pros: Absolutely effective at discouraging gear swaps. Still allows you to swap gear when you find an upgrade, and the 3 minute duration is probably short enough that if you kill an Elite pack and get an upgrade, you can put that upgrade on and have your Magic Find active again by the time you get to the next pack.
Cons: Players who are unfamiliar with the system may open up their details page and see their Magic Find as 0% and not understand why. We could mitigate this by making the 0% MF colored with a tooltip stating the countdown until your Magic Find would work again, as well as what your Magic Find will be when the time expires.
Option 5: Gear Swapping Interacts with Nephalem Valor
There's a whole class of solutions that interact with Nephalem Valor. For example, we could remove a stack of Nephalem Valor when you swap a piece of gear.
Pros: Stops gear swapping just for the last kill, while still allowing the player the option to do so.
Cons: Some players will lose a stack by accident. We could put a confirmation box in to address accidental loss of a stack, but game-interrupting popups are potentially character-killing. It also causes co-op players to drop out of sync. One person may switch gear and lose a stack or two, and if it happens before a boss they'll want to clear two more packs before hitting the boss, but the other party members may not want to -- causing some tense social situations in co-op play. Finally, it tightly couples two systems together and generally tightly-coupled systems don't function over the long haul as well as loosely-coupled systems. In other words, future changes to the Nephalem Valor system or the Magic Find system (or systems related to those two systems) become harder to make as both systems would be impacted.
While we're having our own discussions and tests of how well these options could work, we�re interested to hear your thoughts. We'd mainly like to hear which approaches you like, if there are any specifics you like or don't like about it, and why. Having the context of how this affects you personally really helps us.
We're going to be locking down comments in this article to focus feedback to one location, so please head to the forum thread link below to discuss.
It's worth keeping in mind that if we do implement a method to alleviate gear-swapping in combat, we'll simultaneously be looking at ways for players to get an added MF bonus to compensate.
Here are the solutions we're currently considering, and would appreciate your feedback and opinion on what seems the most reasonable for you, and why:
Option 1: Set a Magic Find Cap
We could set an MF cap between something like 100% and 200%. Nephalem Valor provides 75%, so you would need between 25% and 125% to reach the hard cap. Everyone could find ways to hit the cap for MF% on their gear and then stop.
Pros: Creates a gearing-game around trying to hit the "MF% cap" that some players enjoy. It also solves the swapping issue for people with enough gear to hit the cap. Players who want to min-max and gear swap can do so, and players who think it's stupid but feel "compelled" can try to hit the new cap instead.
Cons: Depending on where the cap is set, it may not actually alleviate gear swapping, and players who wish they didn't have to will feel compelled to do so. It also devalues a highly valuable stat, and desired stats mean desired gear, which helps diversify the item hunt.
Option 2: Slowly Adjust Magic Find Over Time
When you equip an item with Magic Find, we don't let your MF% change right away. Instead your Magic Find slowly "drifts" towards the target Magic Find -- potentially something like 1% every 3 seconds. If you open up your Character Details sheet, you can see the number change "8%... 9%... 10%." Even though you could in theory switch to Magic Find gear for the killing blow and get a few extra percent, it�s probably not worth it.
Pros: High degree of visibility as your stat sheet updates. Still allows you to swap your gear when you get an upgrade in the world without having to feel bad about putting the item on.
Cons: May not alleviate the problem for players who still feel compelled to get a few extra MF%. Depending on the rate, some players may just swap in an item during the last 20 seconds of a fight even though they don't want to.
Option 3: Use your average MF% or your lowest MF% of the last 5 minutes
We could sample your MF% every 30 seconds or so and create a moving average, or use the lowest MF% the game has seen on your character in the last few minutes.
Pros: A lot of the same benefits as Solution 2, but harder to game. Still allows you to switch gear when you get an upgrade, which is great.
Cons: Difficult to communicate. We'd have to communicate this on the Details page somehow, but during normal gameplay there could be the sense of not knowing what your "moving average" is and wanting to look at it. Magic Find is already a difficult number to feel at any point in time, so hidden rules that modify Magic Find feel that much worse.
Option 4: Zero-Out Your MF% for 3 Minutes After Swapping Gear
When you swap gear, your Magic Find is disabled for 3 minutes.
Pros: Absolutely effective at discouraging gear swaps. Still allows you to swap gear when you find an upgrade, and the 3 minute duration is probably short enough that if you kill an Elite pack and get an upgrade, you can put that upgrade on and have your Magic Find active again by the time you get to the next pack.
Cons: Players who are unfamiliar with the system may open up their details page and see their Magic Find as 0% and not understand why. We could mitigate this by making the 0% MF colored with a tooltip stating the countdown until your Magic Find would work again, as well as what your Magic Find will be when the time expires.
Option 5: Gear Swapping Interacts with Nephalem Valor
There's a whole class of solutions that interact with Nephalem Valor. For example, we could remove a stack of Nephalem Valor when you swap a piece of gear.
Pros: Stops gear swapping just for the last kill, while still allowing the player the option to do so.
Cons: Some players will lose a stack by accident. We could put a confirmation box in to address accidental loss of a stack, but game-interrupting popups are potentially character-killing. It also causes co-op players to drop out of sync. One person may switch gear and lose a stack or two, and if it happens before a boss they'll want to clear two more packs before hitting the boss, but the other party members may not want to -- causing some tense social situations in co-op play. Finally, it tightly couples two systems together and generally tightly-coupled systems don't function over the long haul as well as loosely-coupled systems. In other words, future changes to the Nephalem Valor system or the Magic Find system (or systems related to those two systems) become harder to make as both systems would be impacted.
While we're having our own discussions and tests of how well these options could work, we�re interested to hear your thoughts. We'd mainly like to hear which approaches you like, if there are any specifics you like or don't like about it, and why. Having the context of how this affects you personally really helps us.
We're going to be locking down comments in this article to focus feedback to one location, so please head to the forum thread link below to discuss.
RMAH Commodities Coming Soon, Gold Not Included Initially
The RMAH Commodities will soon go live. However gold will not be one of the features going live at first .
Originally Posted by Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
(The following commodities will be available soon for trading in the real-money auction house:
- Gems
- Dyes
- Crafting Materials
- Blacksmithing Plans and Jeweler Designs
- Pages of Training
Still, to reiterate for people who think there will be QQing because overall MF will go down:
Any of the options doesn't matter to me. The only option that affects me is #1 because I already hit over the MF cap with my MF/DPS gear.
REMOVE MF/GF ON GEAR FROM THE GAME.
All players get Nephalem Valor right from the start of the game. there is no cap to Nephalem Valor, and Nephalem Valor persists between acts (letting players start at Act 1 and go through as far as they can handle for the most efficiency). Anything above 5 stacks acts like it does now.
Pity it's too late to implement this solution.
Not totally sure what the big deal is.
Remove Swapping gear during combat.
Give Magic Find users a free NV buff for achieving such high MF # on their item set.
40 MF = 1 NV
80 MF = 2 NV
120 MF = 3 NV
160 MF = 4 NV
200 MF = 5 NV
So this would buff MF users and give people a bigger incentive to gear MF. Right now MF feels weak compare to NV guarantee drops. It shouldn't feel this way. MF should be better than NV. MF > NV
So if you gear MF you get the incentive of being able to farm faster and gain more loot than people without MF.
I like 4 gets the job done without hurting the normal people that bad the rest seem like a bit much, 3 minute CD would be fine in most situations.
Option 4 don't look bad either, but only if it zero the mf on the slot you just swapped.
If those aren't taken into account, then either 2 or 3 would be best, as they are only options that don't kill equipment switch.
Why so many people thing locking in-combat gear swap is good idea? If that go through, you loose any possibility to gear swap for particular nasty affix, and make mf gear worthwhile just for lootables. And since it is one of points they are trying to 'fix', they will just keep them from being affected by your mf at all still. It's lose-lose.
Any change to mf mechanic will also make mf itself a very valuable stat on item, instead of small perk for lazy players like it's now. I'm always for increasing value of stats beside primary/ar/crit.
Only Option one is kind of good, the rest are garbage.
I do not mind swapping gears AT ALL.
What they need to do is to give AN INCENTIVE to keep the gear on
For example and extra 1% magic find per minute when using the same gear (until hitting let's say +100%)
Farming shitty items over and over is not progressing. About 250 hours in on my DH, I've found ONE item that was an actual upgrade that I swapped to on the spot in the past month. But that isn't even the real problem. The real problem is there is no point to playing the game after you beat Diablo on Inferno. Hardcore is a dumb idea by far (stuttering and "intentional" 5 mile distance from attack animation = death)
Blizzard is so fail with D3. Where is the push that Diablo 2 had? "Oh shit, just got X item that requires Y stat points into Z attribute. Let me level so I can use it. I can't wait!" or "Oh wow I leveled after farming for hours on end! I can use that new item! :D"
/rant
But what they should do is let players play how they want to. If people want to swap, let them. Why is it such a problem?
Because people would just wait till 1 mob left, tp to town, swap gear, go back to fight.
Produces more problems than the cooldown option.
Players asked a lot during development, why sky skill swapping would be on a cool-down instead of simply disallowed in combat. Blizzard always answered that there really is not an In-combat, true or false attribute in Diablo. There is no out of combat mode. The game treats you as always in combat.
This will not be an efficient way to farm. If people want to do that, fine, they can waste time while I'm plowing shit down with 305mf.
I think there should be a new graphical interface added just for magic find gear, or button in your character screen (similar to the Nephalem Cube & Cauldron of Jordan). Inside this Cube or whatever is where you can equip your Magic Find gear. Clicking this Cube will cause a 2 second cast time similar to town portal, but instead of just switching gear it would take up all the attributes of your regular dps-gear + the MF% total on your MF set.
This is where the NV stacks can come into play, make it so you can only synthesize your Magic Find with your regular gear when you have at least 1 or a full stack of NV (or only take a % of the MF% off your MF set depending on how many stacks you have). This way you have to work to maintain the stacks in order to utilize the Magic Find gear and will lose the “synthesize” bonus if you lose the NV buff.
With how tough maintaining in Inferno can be with just regular gear i feel this is a decent way to make use of Magic Find, in D2 you could just slap on MF gear on a sorc and still produce good dps because of the way they had their Attribute System and Skill Point system designed. Plus this “synthesize” approach still gives you the feeling of customizing your Magic Find gear, just throwing an idea out there.
Why do I need to spend so much money on equipments? You really call staying in blizzard storm and such hellish environment fun?, just nerf Mt Everest in half and every one will be happy. Hardcores can try climbing it nake or blind folded therefor the challenge is still there for you."
It might not be relevant but yea, thats what I feel about these new trend of people these days. if you dislike something, you go away, not coming in and cry for changes
This is what Blizzard gets for being greedy and trying to collect every dollar from the player every time we sell something. Their profits must not be high enough last and this quarter for the RMAH or in general so lets nerf everything.
Option 6: Uninstall Diablo 3
Option 7: Quit Diablo 3
Option 8: Never buy another blizzard game again if this is their thought process of a fix.