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Since the release of Patch 1.0.4, I have played the more of the actually game rather than the auction house. And I found out some really interesting tips that might make you farming lives a lot easier.

Part 1: To use Magic Find or Not to Use Magic Find

I have found in my gaming experience that magic find doesn’t help me in getting more legendries. Here are two examples in which magic find didn’t help me to get a legendary. I was trying to level up my barbarian, so I joined an open game. After killing my first monster, I saw something unusual on the ground. Yup, you guessed it, it was a legendary. My barbarian doesn't have any magic find on his gear, so the drop was a bit unusual.

I remember another time when I found a legendary during a butcher run. After having all my stacks for the Nephalem Valor Buff and my character was Paragon level 3 (total magic find ~84%), we reached the warden. I was playing my wizard, so I was keeping my distance from the boss. A monster crawled up on the side of bridge and my shock wave killed it. To my surprise that monster dropped a legendary, not a good one, but still sellable at the auction house (100,000+ gold).


These events made me believe that the drop rate might be controlled. So I conducted some research.
I have found a post on the Diablo 3 forums ( https://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/6247736524?page=1 ) stating that the drops rates are predetermined once you join a server. I did some more investigating to see if Blizzard themselves stated anything about magic find and how it can determine drop rates. This led me to the game guide ( http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/game/guide/items/equipment#magic-find ). Under the magic find section, the guide states that there are different types of drop such as magical items, 1- affix rare, 2-affix rare, and so on until legendary. So let’s say that Blizzard does predetermine the drops and your magic find will only increases the quality of the item. So a certain item for example a legendary, will only drop if the player gets lucky with a very low magic find or a player obtains it with a large amount of magic find. So forum the post, we can conclude that some servers might have legendaries while some other might not. And Magic find will help increase the chances of a legendary dropping. But is it worth having bad dps but a very high magic find gear or an amazing dps but with low magic find.

Let’s say that you have a 2% chance of getting a legendary from every monster. And that you stacked up on the Nephalem Valor Buff, so that brings your magic find up to 75% without any additional magic find. So now your chances of finding a legendary from every monster you kill is at about 3%.

With 300% magic find and plus 75% from the Nephalem Valor Buff you have 375% magic find in total. So your total chance of finding a legendary from every monster you kill is at about 17%.

Putting this in perspective of every monster you kill, the results may look a bit different.

Only with the Nephalem Valor Buff, you have a chance of 3 monsters dropping a legendary out of 100 monsters.

With a magic find gear and with the Nephalem Valor Buff, you have a chance of 17 monsters dropping a legendary out of 100 monsters.
In summary, magic find gear is important in increasing you chances in finding a legendary. But we have to consider one more variable and that is how fast you kill monsters with and without magic find gear. If you can one shot enemies and kill elite mobs without much difficulty than it might be better than just having on magic find gear that gets you killed by every elite mob.

Stay tuned to part 2 on how you should build your character to farm legendaries.

(What do you guys think about my post? Was I missing anything? Was it to long? Was it not informative?)

This was better than your oringal posting, but don't give 2 parts. You should have the standard intro, body, and conclusion of a paper/story. No one wants to read something on a forum only to have to wait X amount of time to finish it.

We know MF doesn't scale with respect to 6-affix and 5-affix rares vs 4-affix rares. I suspect the same is true of Legendaries. They did the same thing with Diablo 2. It's likely 200% MF only increases your chance of getting a Legendary only about 50% rather than 100%. I suspect the main reason everyone finds Legendaries from white mobs and chests and corpses is because of the low probability of finding them from anything. Even if Elite drops have 10 times the chance of dropping an Legendary than a white creature, you would only have to kill 11 white creatures for each Elite mob to be more likely to see it drop from white mobs than Elites.

Standard probability assumptions start to "break down" as it were, when you start talking about such a small probability of something happening. In other words, empirical results are incredibly inconsistent and require massively large sample sizes to be able to draw clear conclusions (I would estimate around 125,000 white creatures for a reliable sample size). for what it's worth, my best estimate empirically, which is as good as any, for the probability of a Legendary dropping is about 0.00041 from a Drop 1, Drop 4 and Drop 5 of an Elite mob (about 1 in 2500) with no extra MF. This makes the probability of dropping from any given white mob creatures around 1/5000.

Take a look at the Diablo Fans Magic Find Study for the best source of Magic Find information on the Internet.

I think pretty much everyone agrees more Legendaries are dropping in patch 1.04 than in previous patches. That said, there are also more Legendaries to drop. I believe the order drops are determined are Treasure Class (which group of items drops), ilvl, item drop and Quality/Magic Level. the middle two steps might be swapped. Magic Find affects the last part only as you state. So part of the lack of Legendaries in 1.03 might've been because there weren't any Legendary drops available in the Item/ilvl generated. At that point it would drop a 6-affix rare. It's possible the Legendary drop rate is the same between patches, but there aren't as many of these "missed" anymore.

My opinion is that the best way to "farm" for Legendaries is to stack as much MF as you can without dropping your white kill rate. If you're looking for 1 in particular (Leoric's Signet - see this d3rmt thread here for an extensive discussion), make sure the area you're farming has monsters with the appropriate Treasure Class. I was hunting for the Signet in the Vault of Assassins, which has mlvl 17 monsters (Signet is ilvl 17, clvl 14), but I think only Blazing Guardians and maybe Copperfang Lurkers are capable of dropping rings which makes it a stupid place to search for Signets. Alcarnus, the Sewers and Oasis are much better.

I look forward to hearing which strategies you espouse. :)

Posted by zerokewl at 09/03/2012 08:56 AM

This was better than your original posting, but don't give 2 parts. You should have the standard intro, body, and conclusion of a paper/story. No one wants to read something on a forum only to have to wait X amount of time to finish it.

I need to do some research for part 2. There's a large amount of data to gather consider what to farm and whether or or not to use mf gear. And I also need to find good farming spots.

Posted by ecocd at 09/03/2012 01:06 PM

We know MF doesn't scale with respect to 6-affix and 5-affix rares vs 4-affix rares. I suspect the same is true of Legendaries. They did the same thing with Diablo 2. It's likely 200% MF only increases your chance of getting a Legendary only about 50% rather than 100%. I suspect the main reason everyone finds Legendaries from white mobs and chests and corpses is because of the low probability of finding them from anything. Even if Elite drops have 10 times the chance of dropping an Legendary than a white creature, you would only have to kill 11 white creatures for each Elite mob to be more likely to see it drop from white mobs than Elites.

Standard probability assumptions start to "break down" as it were, when you start talking about such a small probability of something happening. In other words, empirical results are incredibly inconsistent and require massively large sample sizes to be able to draw clear conclusions (I would estimate around 125,000 white creatures for a reliable sample size). for what it's worth, my best estimate empirically, which is as good as any, for the probability of a Legendary dropping is about 0.00041 from a Drop 1, Drop 4 and Drop 5 of an Elite mob (about 1 in 2500) with no extra MF. This makes the probability of dropping from any given white mob creatures around 1/5000.

Take a look at the Diablo Fans Magic Find Study for the best source of Magic Find information on the Internet.

I think pretty much everyone agrees more Legendaries are dropping in patch 1.04 than in previous patches. That said, there are also more Legendaries to drop. I believe the order drops are determined are Treasure Class (which group of items drops), ilvl, item drop and Quality/Magic Level. the middle two steps might be swapped. Magic Find affects the last part only as you state. So part of the lack of Legendaries in 1.03 might've been because there weren't any Legendary drops available in the Item/ilvl generated. At that point it would drop a 6-affix rare. It's possible the Legendary drop rate is the same between patches, but there aren't as many of these "missed" anymore.

My opinion is that the best way to "farm" for Legendaries is to stack as much MF as you can without dropping your white kill rate. If you're looking for 1 in particular (Leoric's Signet - see this d3rmt thread here for an extensive discussion), make sure the area you're farming has monsters with the appropriate Treasure Class. I was hunting for the Signet in the Vault of Assassins, which has mlvl 17 monsters (Signet is ilvl 17, clvl 14), but I think only Blazing Guardians and maybe Copperfang Lurkers are capable of dropping rings which makes it a stupid place to search for Signets. Alcarnus, the Sewers and Oasis are much better.

I look forward to hearing which strategies you espouse. :)

I think Elites don't drop legendaries as much because blizzard doesn't want players to just farm elites but instead to complete the whole content.

They increased the drop rates of white mobs by 4 times in patch 1.0.4 and it seems like we are seeing the result of that chance.

I am going to see what is a good farm spot and to see if it is worth the time.