Why Magic Find Builds Aren't for Everyone

Imagine finding out about a new farming strategy, but the cost of entry to it is far beyond what you could stand to gain from it in the first place...

That is what it's like to play a Magic Find (MF) build.

So over the past couple weeks, I've been interested in putting together a MF Caustic Arrow Pathfinder, and finally decided to start gathering some of the Increased Item Quantity (IIQ) and Increased Item Rarity (IIR) gear after getting bored of my league starter. Keep in mind that the amount of playtime I put into the game this league was not that extraordinary, and I don't usually deploy the most efficient farming strategies on league start. I probably make somewhere around 50 divines per league if I had to give an estimate on how much I play the game, and my average investment into any build falls somewhere between 20-30 divines per build.

So with roughly 30 divines funding my Explosive Arrow Champ league starter, that leaves roughly 20 divines or so left to put into this MF Caustic Arrow idea. Now imagine trying to put together a build that normally takes a hundred divines to ensure that it doesn't die too easily, and has decent damage (as I unfortunately found out later, rather than sooner) - but with only 20 divines.

I was able to gather the necessary cluster jewels, unique items, and had a bow that was strong enough to clear T16s (although it is still quite scuffed and could be better). But one of the things I didn't realize... was the sheer volume of maps I needed to be blasting in order to see any type of return from investing in this build.

There are 2 main things that I think players should take into consideration before trying out this playstyle:

1. Risk vs. Reward: Unlike farming something like Expedition, Harvest, or Delirium Orbs, the rate at which MF characters find anything worth value (i.e. Expensive Uniques, Divine Orbs, etc.) is a lot more inconsistent than any regular solo build just farming a mechanic on the Atlas. Sure, it's possible (and more likely than if you went non-MF) that you could drop a Mageblood on Map 1, but like most people, it'll probably drop on Map 30,000.

The sheer volume of maps that you would need to farm playing MF (and therefore the amount of time you would need to invest into playing PoE) is far greater due to this inconsistent, high-value drop rate. If I were to spend as much time playing this MF build now (as I did for my league starter), I might be able to drop something valuable and make an upgrade - but I also might not. And this is why players will typically describe MF builds as having High Risk/High Return. And it's only by farming a large pool of maps, and investing a significant amount of time playing MF builds, that players begin to see outsized returns.

2. Low Damage/Survivability: Because of the lack of income due to how my Atlas passives were setup (which by all means, could literally be the reason why I haven't been seeing rewards like you might find in any MF build highlight video), it was difficult to make step-wise improvements on the build and see it progress in a similar fashion to non-MF builds. With only ~20 divines invested, no Headhunter, and resistances not even capped (this was compensated by a Topaz Flask) - MF builds get "stuck" in a way that is quite a bit more difficult than if non-MF builds were to get stuck (unless of course, you get a lucky drop). Even considering the fact that dropping Incandescent or Screaming Invitations is the one source of income you have access to, 1 Divine every 28 maps (or ~25 if you run Etched by Void/Baptised by Fire), the upgrades needed for a MF build unfortunately are also high cost, so you’d still want to bank on a valuable unique item dropping to fund the upgrades.

Anyways, that’s just been my experience trying out Magic Find for the first time. I’m sure there’s plenty of areas for improvement that I’ve overlooked, and I’m sure Magic Finding is still a fantastic build archetype. But the next time I see another Magic Find highlight video, I’ll know that behind the scenes of these high-tier unique drops, there’s probably a large amount of maps that saw almost nothing remotely similar in value.

Thanks for reading. Any suggestions or criticisms are welcome. I’d also like to hear more about the Righteous Fire Chieftain version of a MF build if anyone has tried that one out yet. I hear it’s quite a bit tankier than Pathfinder at low to mid-level investments.

If you’re curious about my Explosive Arrow league starter, I do also have a short video on that here. Thanks all, hope you have a great day.

but which values are worth it? and I read that iir doesn't work on mats drop?

I usually get to 200% iiq+iir at the beginning of the map and don't see much improvement. but the enemies become deadly. My minions facetank the stuff and AG has anti crit chest. But I don't know how it would be seen without minions on a low budget.
Because the enemies quickly become deadly in rare T16 maps. Without eater shrines there are often 3-4 extra shots and extra 300% ele mods.

Gotta like how luck works my first Apo drop this league was in a corrupted normal crimson temple with 6% Quality from the very first pack of monsters with no Magic Find. My next 2 were from when I started speed running my maps instead of stopping to do mechanics.

Before that I was spending 60-100c per map to juice with 0 apo card drops

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XerxezBreak wrote:

Gotta like how luck works my first Apo drop this league was in a corrupted normal crimson temple with 6% Quality from the very first pack of monsters with no Magic Find. My next 2 were from when I started speed running my maps instead of stopping to do mechanics.

Before that I was spending 60-100c per map to juice with 0 apo card drops

Is there a drop booster mechanic here? So if you don't play for a long time and no items drop, the chance of a useful drop is increased?

I'm getting usable items after a long break and then all that drops are garbage that no one needs.

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Riorrrrrr wrote:

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XerxezBreak wrote:

Gotta like how luck works my first Apo drop this league was in a corrupted normal crimson temple with 6% Quality from the very first pack of monsters with no Magic Find. My next 2 were from when I started speed running my maps instead of stopping to do mechanics.

Before that I was spending 60-100c per map to juice with 0 apo card drops

Is there a drop booster mechanic here? So if you don't play for a long time and no items drop, the chance of a useful drop is increased?

I'm getting usable items after a long break and then all that drops are garbage that no one needs.

No.

Flipping doesnt require any gear not build and its still best money/h one can get.
But its also "not for everyone" for diffrent reasons.

IMO GGG failed with copying MFing from D2.

Reasons:

1. Quant gear is extremaly limiting for building - Any Quant mod (or bad quant item) you have means less possible multipliers to scale damage, which means you are forced to pick 1 out of very few MFing builds

2. You don't "feel" increase in quant (unless u do harvest). It's an invisible stat in PoE that you can only really measure by amount of dropped div cards over long span of maps.

3. Quant is extremaly difficult to get, (usually on bad gear)

4. Rarity is easy to obtain, but in amounts that are just not enough to be worthwhile.

5. There's also the case where your Map comes with quant (and rarity), not to mention altars, all adding up the difficulty.

Versus Diablo:

1. Perfect Topaz armour + Gheed + alibaba (or was it runeword?) = Entry level of MFing obtainable quite quickly/cheaply

2. MF builds are limited mostly to sorc/barb (first due to teleport and huge elemental damage, second for beating dead horse screams)

3. MF build can be further upgraded with IST runes, runewords(s)

4. You see loot improvements immidately. That doesn't mean better loot drops always, but you just see the pile is noticeably more shiny.

It's basic. It's simple. And you don't have hundreds of RNG stats to watch for and/or in fear of like in PoE.

Finally the PoE problem is it's all about insane amounts of maps you mow through. IIQ/IIR are just multipliers of "maps ran". Sure Diablo was also just about that, but beyond chaos cathedral, which was the most map-like, you ran quick instances that were several dimensions less difficult and overall much faster than PoE maps.

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XerxezBreak wrote:

Gotta like how luck works my first Apo drop this league was in a corrupted normal crimson temple with 6% Quality from the very first pack of monsters with no Magic Find. My next 2 were from when I started speed running my maps instead of stopping to do mechanics.

Before that I was spending 60-100c per map to juice with 0 apo card drops

I'm curious as to what extent would stacking Increased Item Quant be worth it. Because if you can argue that you run way more maps within a given timeframe by rolling a non-MF build, would that not essentially yield a greater quantity of items dropped overall?

Let's say in 1 hour, with an MF build, you can drop 1000 items across 10 maps (100 items per map). But with a non-MF build, you drop 50 items per map, but can run 30 maps in the hour (totaling 1500 items across 30 maps). I'd imagine that in this scenario, rolling non-MF is just better.

So what I'm curious about is where that threshold, for making MF worth it, actually is. Idk if you might have any thoughts on this, but maybe there's someone out there who might be willing to share their data/experience on this as well.

The problem with IIQ/R is that you do really need to run thousands of maps under pretty optimized conditions, and count up ALL the currency drops, to see a correlation between numbers on gear and actual output.

We can't actually do this because the majority of currency and item drops are hidden by loot filters. Hit ALT and you'll see the bulk of your missing output all over the floor in the form of duplicated and reduplicated scroll drops, t4/5 bubblegum, and t4/5 trash uniques as well as a deluge of trash rares.

It's a common saying in MF community that the first 150% IIQ and 500% IIR are lost to science because you need more than these at minimum to be able to detect an economically significant increase in the quality of items and currencies dropped in your maps.

Ofc the easy answer is don't solo MF. The single biggest source of IIQ/R is party size. But few teams have dedicated 6-man party structures and most can only pay for the time of an aurabot, at most, maybe also a cursebot. After dividing map profits 3 ways, there's very little left over for juice. Which is in itself, quite lossy because of an increased dependence on mod count to fuel packsize and the sheer number of mods you MUST reroll if you're doing MF with or without an aurabot.

You typically spend somewhere between 1-2 div per map x thousands of maps. You may spend 2 hours a day rolling crimsons and trading for scarabs and sextants. If you spend this on fixing your resists or upgrading your bow to a +2 arrow, your career is over because now you have no juice money and you can't pay your aura. Without an aura, you can't afford to sustain the juice at all.

I'm not sure what the magical science behind it is. I setup my own poison soulrend pathfinder magic find earlier in the league and within 20 maps I had my first Apo drop. Tons of exceptional gems had dropped. A very good amount of 7 years bad luck cards... and I wasn't bothering to do 8 mod crimsons corrupted. I just rolled them to around 90% and called it a day, no sextants involved either. I did run deli and tried to get beyond rolled as often as I could but I didn't spend much time trying to force it.

Sadly too, out of all pathfinders running soulrend, I had the highest dps according to poe ninja and was using the ascetic setup lol (normal dagger, magic helm with life + rarity bench craft).

I noticed a difference for sure without hitting crazy numbers or blasting 300 maps a day. Surviving wasn't terrible, the investment wasn't crazy, and actually seemed to perform as a budget mf build.