Magic find gear is bad game design

So we're coming up on a month into the league, and as usual half the playerbase is running around doing their "endgame" farming in tier 7 maps with as many trash iiq/iir items as their mirrored bow and headhunter/mageblood can carry.

These "magic find" items are contrary to the entire power fantasy of PoE and ARPGs in general - to watch your character improve and grow in power over time. It's an antiquated mechanic from the Diablo 2 era, and it was already a bad mechanic in that game (though its negative effects were less visible, since a lot of top tier gear had magic find, and there was no such thing as increased item quantity). MF items throw this power fantasy completely off the rails. There is little point working to obtain best in slot gear and perfect your character when the optimal strategy is to neuter your character to the point of just barely functioning, stacking all the garbage IIQ items you can, and dropping all the way down to yellow maps. I myself and many other players I've talked to feel the same way - I don't want to run IIQ/IIR gear, but if I don't at least have SOME it feels like I'm shooting myself in the foot. When the best way to find loot isn't to create the most powerful character you can and run the hardest content possible then there is a problem with the game's design.

Years ago you could roll item quantity on gear, meaning that you could still use functional items, but you would give up one or two affixes to get maximum item quantity. Now, instead of giving up a couple affixes, you're giving up entire item slots. The current system is literally the worst of both worlds. MF gear should be removed from the game entirely, but at the very least if that doesn't happen IIQ should be added back into the item mod pool, because at least then there is still end-game item progression for all item slots.

Now everything I've mentioned above speaks to player motives, core gameplay loop and character progression. But there's an even bigger problem with mf gear (particularly item quantity, as it is literally just a loot multiplier). Aside from pigeonholing gear, as well as build (you need a build whose mandatory item slots don't compete with the best mf items), it also prices out non-mf players from a lot of the "juiced" content (which is also the most fun content). MF players can afford to pay a higher premium for sextants, scarabs, etc. than non-mf players. If a given juiced map has an expected base yield of 5 divines, someone with just +50% item quantity can afford to pay up to 6 divines and still make a 1.5 div profit per map. Meanwhile, the non-mf player would be LOSING 1 divine per map at that price. It makes absolutely no sense that the financial viability of running content would be tied to an arbitrary stat like item quantity, instead of build strength (ie is this map going to 6 portal you without you being able to complete it?).

Imagine if you had equipable items that improved the odds of bosses dropping their rarest loot. Some random amulet that gave 1.5x the chance of any boss' best item(s) dropping, or just a 50% chance for them to drop an additional item from their loot pool. It sounds ridiculous, but that is EXACTLY what item quantity does for maps. Of course it would be mandatory to run these items if you wanted to do a bossing build, and it would warp the bossing meta towards whatever builds were not reliant on whatever item slot that "boss quantity" item took up. By the way, this is pretty much exactly what happened back in I believe Ritual with multi-boxing and Feared invitations. It's slightly different in that it wasn't from an item, but rather from running multiple instances in maven boss completions so that you could get 6 feared runs for the price of one. Lo and behold, the price of all the fragments rose to the point that it was a net loss to run the content if you did not have AT LEAST 2.3 instances running. GGG rightfully fixed that system, but the market principles at play are exactly the same as with magic find gear. You either run mf or you get priced out of the content. I couldn't tell you how many times during Crucible (my last league) I was watching a video about some farming strategy and they put a giant caveat stating that it was only viable for MF builds, because otherwise the cost was too high.

This is the single biggest issue with PoE in its current state, and it desperately needs to be remedied.

No it isn't.

And MF isn't a big deal btw it's the wisp you can do this entire strat without MF and make a decent chunk of munz if you know what you're doing.

If a person wants to MF let them MF; Same concept hence PoE 2 STILL has MF and IT'S STILL there.

Can account for this. Just to see what all the rage was about I specc'd the optimized WP setup for the strategy and blasted away in T16s without any MF period, and just wisps + altars were enough to make me make my loot filter stricter.. twice.

Has the upside of Kirac maps with +2 Abyss implicits too.

Next season we will have no wisps and MF will be the same it always was.

(and btw I specc'd out of it after 2 days because it's boring af)

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ArtCrusade wrote:

Can account for this. Just to see what all the rage was about I specc'd the optimized WP setup for the strategy and blasted away in T16s without any MF period, and just wisps + altars were enough to make me make my loot filter stricter.. twice.

Has the upside of Kirac maps with +2 Abyss implicits too.

Next season we will have no wisps and MF will be the same it always was.

(and btw I specc'd out of it after 2 days because it's boring af)

Yes, this league mitigates the effects of mf somewhat due to the difficulty of the mechanic as well as the addition of valdo's, which do not drop in t7 maps. Other leagues will have an even bigger problem with mf.

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Coconutdoggy wrote:

No it isn't.

And MF isn't a big deal btw it's the wisp you can do this entire strat without MF and make a decent chunk of munz if you know what you're doing.

If a person wants to MF let them MF; Same concept hence PoE 2 STILL has MF and IT'S STILL there.

Clearly didn't even read the post. Also I wasn't particularly talking about this league; if anything, the effects of MF are mitigated somewhat due to the difficulty of the league mechanic, and yet we're still seeing massive numbers of players going for that strategy.

It's a fundamentally broken system.

People go MF this hard because content creators are playing MF for the strategy. It's the good ol' copy/paste community back at it again

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ArtCrusade wrote:

People go MF this hard because content creators are playing MF for the strategy. It's the good ol' copy/paste community back at it again

People go mf because they care more about loot than having a strong character

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ArtCrusade wrote:

People go MF this hard because content creators are playing MF for the strategy. It's the good ol' copy/paste community back at it again

So its not true, cause u find it boring and dont use it anymore and its not true, cause of copy/paste from streamers?

lmao

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Latze wrote:

So its not true, cause u find it boring and dont use it anymore and its not true, cause of copy/paste from streamers?

lmao

If you have to quote me without adding anything to the conversation at least don't be so intellectually dishonest about it.

the whole situation about doing a char that can make currency so you can make more currency is absurd. you end up with a char that can barely take elder, shaper, lycia and alike.

if i decide to check youtube what streamer are cooking i end up with 85% of the vids about some farming strat. path of farming...

only logical solution for a real game is to remove quant/rarity.