Introduction
About the most fun modifiers to load up in are ones that add to your chance to find Magical Items. The main goals of the game for most are to level up, and to find nice items. Better equipment is fun to find, and makes your character more powerful, and adding Magic Find, or "+MF", as it's called, is a great way to get better stuff to drop from monsters and chests.
You can get +MF on most every type of item in the game. Gloves or Boots or jewelry with +10% or 15% or 30% won't make a real noticeable difference on their own, but as you accumulate more and more items with these bonuses, you'll start to notice that you find more Rares, Uniques, Set Items, etc.
The easiest way to add it is by socketing perfect topazes into Armor or Helm. Getting a hold of 4 socket armor and a 3 socket helm shouldn't be too hard, and that's 168% right there.
There is no cap on magic find, but there are diminishing returns as of v1.09, see the table below for the actual stats. You'll start to notice improvements at around 100% Magic Find, and by 200-300% it will start to get very addictive.
Characters who can kill with their skills, especially Sorcs, are the best at going to a very high Magic Find, since they don't need equipment for their offense. Barbarians are very good also, since they get huge hit points and resistance bonuses form their skills and stats, so need less good equipment to survive, and can dual wield Gulls or Ali Babas for a huge MF bonus from the weapon slots.
It can be a lot of fun to load up all your best +MF stuff and do item runs on normal or Nightmare where you don't really need much good gear to survive. Killing the bosses, Mephisto, Diablo, and Baal are the best drops and they can can all be reached pretty quickly, especially Meph. You won't get the best stuff, Elite set or unique items on Nightmare (some of the lowest elite item types can drop from Baal or Diablo, but your odds aren't good) but there are lots of very good Exceptional items that can be found there.
For obvious reasons, Hardcore characters have to be more careful about going all out on +MF stuff. Usually resistances drop very low when switching to the magic find equipment, and one Lightning Enchanted boss that you would normally tear right through can be suddenly deadly if your Lightning Resistance is -22%, rather than your normal 65%. For example.
Magic Find Percentages
Magic Find doesn't boost your odds of finding everything equally. It's all the same up to 100%, but after that your odds of finding Rares, Sets, and Uniques drop steeply. Blizzard added this in since it's possible to get such huge Magic Find numbers in the Expansion, and they didn't want it to be so easy to find the really good/scarce stuff.
You can see exactly how much in the table below.
| Magic Find | Magical | Rares | Set Items | Uniques |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| 150% | 150% | 146% | 145% | 141% |
| 200% | 200% | 185% | 183% | 171% |
| 250% | 250% | 220% | 215% | 193% |
| 300% | 300% | 250% | 242% | 211% |
| 400% | 400% | 300% | 287% | 236% |
| 500% | 500% | 340% | 322% | 253% |
| 750% | 750% | 412% | 382% | 280% |
| 1000% | 1000% | 460% | 421% | 295% |
| 1200% | 1200% | 494% | 448% | 305% |
| 1500% | 1500% | 520% | 468% | 312% |
The actual % that is applied towards finding each type of item. Magical is full, Rare/Set/Uniques are less.
How much you want to wear should be based largely on these percentages. More always helps for magical items, so if you have 1000% MF you'll get incredible amounts of blue items. The weapons might be useful, but the odds aren't good. Charms and Jewels are not boosted by your +MF%, so this doesn't help with those. Best way to find more of those is to kill more things. Rares increase pretty well up to 600% MF or so, but Set items really slow down past 400 or 500%. Uniques are much the same, but even worse in the diminishing returns. Notice that from 300% to 1500% only increases your Uniques MF% by 101%.
If you can get to 250-350% that's really all you need, in terms of finding Sets and Uniques at an increased rate. More after that generally doesn't make enough of a difference to be worth the equipment sacrifices, especially if you are playing Hardcore.
In addition to this, many monsters have unequal odds to drop the various qualities of items. Act Bosses have better odds to drop Uniques than anything else does.
Magic Find FAQ
What exactly does +MF do?
Basically, Magic Find makes more of the items that drop be magical or better (Rare/Set/Unique). If you have 100% +MF, if an item dropped normally had a 10% chance to be magical, it will now have a 20% chance. You won't get more items dropping, but the ones that do drop will be better items. More players in a game = more item drops, so you want to try and combine the +MF with a big MP game for the best results.
For a hypothetical example, say normally out of 100 item drops, you would get 20 magic, 2 rare, 2 set, and 1 unique. With 100% +MF you'd expect 40 magic, 4 Rare, 4 Set, and 2 Uniques. It's never exactly like this, but that's about how much it should increase.
What are the "Magic Items" that this finds more of?
MF doesn't make more items drop, nor does it make Elite or Exceptional items drop more often. Magic Find merely increases the chances that an item, when dropped, will be "high quality". Unique, Set, Rare, etc. With Magic Find, normal items will more often be magical or better, and items that are always at least magical (jewelry, charms, jewels, etc) more often be higher quality.
What things doesn't MF help with?
Magic Find helps you get more magical, set, rare, and unique items.
Magic Find % does not make:
- More total items drop.
- Higher level items drop.
- More of a particular type of item (such as rings/amulets) drop.
- More Exceptional or Elite Items drop. More of the ones that do drop will be magical or better, though.
- More Charms drop.
- More Jewels drop. It does make more of the Jewels that do drop be Rare, instead of magical.
- The rarer Unique rings and amulets drop. It does increase the chances of a ring/amulet being better than magical though.
- More or less Runes drop. MF has no effect either way.
- It has no factor on gambling, that's all just luck.
What are "High Quality" items?
"High Quality" refers to Unique, Set, or Rare items. The sorts of things that Magic Find enables you to find more of. It does not refer to item type, since Magic Find has no effect on if a monster drops a short bow or a hydra bow.
Since Magic Find has diminishing returns, is 110% the best?
No, the more MF you have the better, always, in terms of getting higher quality items. 1000% will find more Uniques, over time, than 900%, and far far more than 300% or 200%. The balance comes in how long it takes you. If you can do an item finding run in 10 minutes with 1000% MF, and the same run in 3 minutes with 500% MF, it's probably better to go faster, since you could do the same run 3x, which would be better odds for good equipment over all.
What order are items checked to drop? March 7, 2002
The game first determines what type of item will be dropped; Magic Find has no effect on this. Once the item is determined, your MF is checked in determining if the item is Unique, Rare, etc. The game rolls for Unique first, then Set, Rare, Magical, and normal. This is why more MF is always better, since it boosts your odds of Unique, Set, and Rare. Since SuperUniques, bosses, and Act Bosses always drop at least magical items, (and have much better odds of dropping higher quality items than normal monsters do) MF there will make a big difference.