Don't Remove MF from the Game; Just Cut it in Half

Having a 135% and 160% base seems un-intuitive to me, and while I'm glad you took my suggestion of halving MF values on gear, it might not be technologically feasible. GGG tends to have difficulties changing stats on existing items, and this takes it to a whole new level.

There are ways of halving MF gear effectiveness without nerfing the gear outright. As I've written in the main thread:

1. Make IIQ from maps Additive with gear instead of Multiplicative.

2. Buff IIQ from maps by 50%

3. Make rare maps have IIR as well as IIQ.

According to my rough estimates, this makes MF gear half as effective due to diminishing returns.

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iamstryker wrote:

It feels so odd sometimes to play my non magic find guys. Earlier today I had done some maps and then decided to run piety just for the heck of it since I didn't really have much time left to play. I killed piety and all she dropped was magic items and whites. Not even one rare?

Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised but that just feels bad to me.

Re posting this.

I like the idea of IIQ and IIR. I dont like having to make that kind of a tradeoff on gear though. I think blizzrd was onto something with paragon/NV5. PoE should do its own thing of course and I have no idea what that could be but almost anything would be better than the classic MF system. It was never really fun gimping your combat effectivness to find better gear, or having to have multiple gear sets. The tradeoff when leveling up is fine, Im mostly thinking about endgame mf'ing.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Where I differ from the "remove MF completely" crowd is: although I see the problems in the strength of MF, I also don't want to burn bridges with the MF-lovers of this game. MF should be a viable build choice; we still want players to be able to make characters which are considerably more effective than normal characters at farming. What we don't want and don't need is for them to be so much more effective like they are now.

Removing MF from gear is the only way to balance reward vs. risk. Halving MF doesn't change the player behavior of running low risk content for the biggest rewards.

The problem with MF is how it behaves in a party.

In solo play, people can sacrifice stats on gear, and therefore clear speed/survivability in order to get more loot. If you cut your clear speed in half to get 150% rarity, this is probably worth it, assuming most of your profit comes from rares/uniques and not currency drops. If you cut your clear speed in half for 100% rarity, you are essentially breaking even.

In a party of 6, mobs have 250% life. However there are 6 players (obviously). Ignoring any synergies between players (which obviously exist) and assuming all the players are about equal, you get 600% more dps compared to a single person. This equates in to a 240% increase in clear speed.

Now consider if the last person in the party is an mfer. They do negligible damage but use culling strike and 100% rarity (obviously too low for a real mfer). Because the party does so much damage, they can only cull rares and bosses, but most loot drops from rares/bosses anyways. Now, 250% monster life is split among 5 people doing actual damage. This is still a 200% increase in clear speed compared to solo. Now the mfer comes along and doubles the loo drops with 100% rarity, gives 400% efficiency compared to solo farming with no mf. If you consider the more realistic example that OP posted, that is 1740% increased efficiency. (not even taking into account the fact that the mfer culls, which is considerable damage in a party of 6, and still does some damage along the way).

Note that if OP was solo farming with 870% more rares/uniques with his mf setup, he is not getting 870% efficiency compared to solo no mf farming, since he lost clear speed in order to get that mf.

I understand and agree with the fact that path of exile is a multiplayer game and game mechanics should provide incentive for players to group. However, 17 times more loot is a little bit absurd. My solution would be to scale down magic find stats in parties. ie, magic find operates at 20% decreased efficiency per party member past the first person, which leads to an 80% reduction in a full group. Since iiq/iir scale off of each other, a 80% reduction to both actually leads to more than an 80% reduction to total increased loot gain. Taking OPs stats, he would have 66.4% effective rarity, and 20.6% effective quantity, which results in 200% (1.664*1.206 = 2.0) increased rare/unique drops. If he is culling in a party of 6, then that is only ~400% increased efficiency compared to solo no mf farming, which is much more reasonable.

This change wouldn't affect the solo player at all, and wouldn't make rolling good map mods any less important. The only thing that would be affected is the absolutely absurd gain in efficiency due grouping with a culling mfer.

The problem is you guys mindset geez just party up with an mfer or make one yourself... 1 out of 6 guys in a party needs to be an mfer that is 1/6 seems pretty fair to me.

Also U dont need much before you see a big difference in drops just have 50/150 and you are golden. Rest is just cream on the top which people use a lot of time and effort to get which would be another reason why it would be bad to change how it works. Your suggestions only cater to the casuals which don't even play the game much. You just want everything handed to you with no work and the only classes that should be possible is dps/tank.

When will you learn that removing aspects from a game is generally a bad idea?

Problem here is the grass is always greener on the other side and jealousy is a bad thing.

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Angryweasel wrote:

Your suggestions only cater to the casuals which don't even play the game much. You just want everything handed to you with no work and the only classes that should be possible is dps/tank.

When will you learn that removing aspects from a game is generally a bad idea?

Problem here is the grass is always greener on the other side and jealousy is a bad thing.

Everything in quotes is BS.

If your going to throw the word casual around at least define it. Also you apparently think that playing solo should be much worse than grouping when the devs have stated the game was designed around solo play.

BTW soloing is harder than grouping so I don't know where you get off saying that a casual solo player wants stuff handed to him when he is already playing in a more difficult style.

For the purpose of this discussion, I will use the term "MF" to refer to the combination of both IIR and IIQ.
MF:=(1+IIR)*(1+IIQ)
There are multiple aspects to the discussion. As OP posted, MF has advantage to no MF. As many have pointed out, parties have advantage to solo. These two things both effect efficiency, and should be considered together.

1) Party efficiency
The IIQ from parties should be split between IIQ and IIR. This would reduce ground clutter in large parties without reducing net rarity. I would also advocate slightly increasing health multiplier in parties to equalize the clearspeed difference from solo.

2) MF vs. None
The difference between max MF and none is certainly huge, at least 4x the efficiency. This may be too large. If so, there are different ways of reducing it.
One is to simply lower IIR and IIQ values on everything to reach the desired ratio. It involves nerfing player gear and will not be well-received. Another is to introduce diminishing returns. If D2 is any indicator, players will begrudgingly accept this.
A third option is to give players intrinsic MF that grows above the baseline 100%. It's an open-ended question to decide what causes the bar to rise above the baseline 100%, but a simple option would be to grant 1% IIR for each character level. This could be refined by using separate xp rules (like gems) and having a shared object (like the stash) that effects all your characters in a given league equally. The purpose is to change the comparison from 100% MF vs. 400% MF, to 150% MF vs. 450% MF. This cuts the advantage from 4x to 3x without negatively impacting anyone.

1) Don't cut MF in half
2) Do increase base IIQ/IIR rates
3) Change game mechanics so you can't build pure MF (basically remove totems, or make totems send damage back to caster). MF should always be a trade-off, not something you can just build into.

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BloodReign wrote:

Removing MF from gear is the only way to balance reward vs. risk. Halving MF doesn't change the player behavior of running low risk content for the biggest rewards.

No, it's actually a guaranteed way to imbalance it.

Players of Path of Exile fall somewhere on a continuum between two extremes: adrenaline junkies who want the singular most hardcore experience possible, and rather sedate players who want to calmly grind by killing vast, vast amounts of non-threatening enemies. The adrenaline folks come to PoE for a challenge; the farmers come to PoE for tranquility, an escape from the stresses of their lives.

Let's say you have both of these extreme archetypes reach The Docks in Merciless. Adrenaline guy wants to farm that area for as brief a time as possible; the real excitement is in end-game maps, so he just wants more survivability, maybe some more DPS, so he can handle that higher content. Farmer guy? He is more content to just farm that area for perhaps another week or two, and the only affixes he'd be looking for in terms of upgrades would be more DPS or more MF; he can already handle the content well enough.

Now as a developer, there are essentially three options here:

• 1. Cater excessively to the farmers, alienating those who consider themselves hardcore by disproportionately rewarding the farmers.
• 2. Cater excessively to the adrenaline junkies, alienating the farmers by disproportionately rewarding the highest-level content relative to content a few tiers below.
• 3. Strike a smart balance, alienating neither audience and keeping both player mentalities viable within the game.

Right now I think we can agree that we have #1. You want #2. However, the correct answer is #3. In order to succeed long-term, PoE needs to keep both its hard and soft audiences and avoid false dichotomies which force it to choose between them.

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BigRussianDude wrote:

The problem with MF is how it behaves in a party.

Spoiler

In solo play, people can sacrifice stats on gear, and therefore clear speed/survivability in order to get more loot. If you cut your clear speed in half to get 150% rarity, this is probably worth it, assuming most of your profit comes from rares/uniques and not currency drops. If you cut your clear speed in half for 100% rarity, you are essentially breaking even.

In a party of 6, mobs have 250% life. However there are 6 players (obviously). Ignoring any synergies between players (which obviously exist) and assuming all the players are about equal, you get 600% more dps compared to a single person. This equates in to a 240% increase in clear speed.

Now consider if the last person in the party is an mfer. They do negligible damage but use culling strike and 100% rarity (obviously too low for a real mfer). Because the party does so much damage, they can only cull rares and bosses, but most loot drops from rares/bosses anyways. Now, 250% monster life is split among 5 people doing actual damage. This is still a 200% increase in clear speed compared to solo. Now the mfer comes along and doubles the loo drops with 100% rarity, gives 400% efficiency compared to solo farming with no mf. If you consider the more realistic example that OP posted, that is 1740% increased efficiency. (not even taking into account the fact that the mfer culls, which is considerable damage in a party of 6, and still does some damage along the way).

Note that if OP was solo farming with 870% more rares/uniques with his mf setup, he is not getting 870% efficiency compared to solo no mf farming, since he lost clear speed in order to get that mf.

I understand and agree with the fact that path of exile is a multiplayer game and game mechanics should provide incentive for players to group. However, 17 times more loot is a little bit absurd. My solution would be to scale down magic find stats in parties. ie, magic find operates at 20% decreased efficiency per party member past the first person, which leads to an 80% reduction in a full group. Since iiq/iir scale off of each other, a 80% reduction to both actually leads to more than an 80% reduction to total increased loot gain. Taking OPs stats, he would have 66.4% effective rarity, and 20.6% effective quantity, which results in 200% (1.664*1.206 = 2.0) increased rare/unique drops. If he is culling in a party of 6, then that is only ~400% increased efficiency compared to solo no mf farming, which is much more reasonable.

This change wouldn't affect the solo player at all, and wouldn't make rolling good map mods any less important. The only thing that would be affected is the absolutely absurd gain in efficiency due grouping with a culling mfer.

That is a very illogical approach to my suggestion. If you look at it more rationally, you'd see that its as I said in the OP: group play isn't changed much, MFer solo play isn't changed much, non-MFer solo play gets a significant buff. This is actually a targeted buff to solo, non-MF play.

However, if I were to make a second suggestion on how to fix group play (also a response to PolarisOrbit), it would be as follows...

First, instance management would be enabled on map portals. This would mean that a solo player could run a map six times with a single map, assuming they only used one portal each time. This would eliminate the grouping advantage on map cost. Map drop rates may (or may not) be adjusted downward slightly to compensate for this new advantage.

Second, the group bonus would now apply to the following traits; the value of the multiplier is the square root of the number of players (so about a 2.45 multiplier for a six-player party), unless otherwise noted:

• Monster Life.
• Item Rarity. This would apply to maps.
• Currency/gem-only Item Quantity. Not maps (for this bonus anyway).
• (non-Unique monsters only) Monster Pack Size. This effects item quantity, total monster pack life, and total monster pack DPS, without focusing that DPS too much on any single player. A six-player group would be swarmed by monsters. This would also lead to more maps being dropped for groups (compensating somewhat for the new solo instance management).
• (Unique monsters only) Monster Life, a second time. So in a 6-player party, a unique boss would have sqrt(6)*sqrt(6)=6 times as much life.
• (Unique monsters only) Item Quantity (for everything this time). Stacks with the currency/gem quantity from earlier for a 6x multiplier for full groups. Would increase map drops.
• (Unique monsters only) Move/Attack/Cast speed. This wouldn't be the standard multiplier, but instead .5+sqrt(players)/2 — 20% more speed for 2-man, 36% for 3-man, 50% for 4-man, 62% for 5-man, 72% for 6-man. Additionally, unique monster AI would be tweaked to prevent focusing on a single character; bosses would use that movespeed to better spread their focus to all characters in the party.

This would mean that group killspeed wouldn't be much faster than solo (the total monster pack health for a 6-man group is 6 times solo, although AoEs would be more effective), total rare/unique drops would be the same as solo after splitting 6 ways (with less overall quantity, reducing screen clutter), and perhaps most importantly, group play wouldn't be so much safer than solo play, while still spreading out the increased group DPS so that no one player is overwhelmed.

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PolarisOrbit wrote:

A third option is to give players intrinsic MF that grows above the baseline 100%. It's an open-ended question to decide what causes the bar to rise above the baseline 100%, but a simple option would be to grant 1% IIR for each character level. This could be refined by using separate xp rules (like gems) and having a shared object (like the stash) that effects all your characters in a given league equally. The purpose is to change the comparison from 100% MF vs. 400% MF, to 150% MF vs. 450% MF. This cuts the advantage from 4x to 3x without negatively impacting anyone.

I really don't want to see paragon levels in this game; in Diablo 3 they were used to essentially kill the efficiency of MF builds entirely, which isn't what we should be wanting here. I guess that without a hard cap the suggestion wouldn't be as bad as that (kind of like saying "he may have killed some people but he's no Jeff Dahmer"), but making MF less build-dependent and more flat-level-dependent is a bad move for build creativity. I'd rather see MF nodes in the passive tree as an optional form of level-dependent MF than a flat, non-choice version; however, balancing those passive nodes would be a chore and a half.

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Thalandor wrote:

1) Don't cut MF in half
2) Do increase base IIQ/IIR rates
3) Change game mechanics so you can't build pure MF (basically remove totems, or make totems send damage back to caster). MF should always be a trade-off, not something you can just build into.

This is an ineffective way of handling the problem, kind of like playing Whack-a-Mole. You nerf totems, and then what... MF summoners? Okay, nerf that. Then MF Discharge... then Lightning Arrow... essentially this devolves into a never-ending nerf crusade focused on builds and not on MF itself. My suggestion isn't a nerf suggestion; it's actually a targeted buff to zero-MF solo players.