Blizzard Updates on Magic Find and Gear-Swapping Issues
Posted 5 July 2012 by FluxBlizzard CMs added a couple of updates on all the ongoing debate over the End Game shortcomings and their evolving plans for Magic Find gear swapping. First, here’s Bashiok on their MF plans.
“It’s worth keeping in mind that if we do implement a method to alleviate gear-swapping in combat, we’ll simultaneously be looking at ways for players to get an added MF bonus to compensate.”
For example we implement one of the options and could… maybe buff up NV stacks with additional magic find, which could/would compensate for MF lost due to any solutions. We don’t want anyone thinking we’re trying to take their magic find away. We’re trying to help alleviate some of the complaints about tedium and loss of inventory space while helping you keep the benefits.
In a longer post by the ever-polite Lylirra,
Lylirra: Parting the veils a little bit here…
There was some debate about Magic Find gear swapping before the game shipped. Some of our developers and testers thought it was fun way to game the system, while others felt it was too much of a hassle. In the end, we decided to allow gear swapping, thinking that the players who wanted to do it would, and the players who don’t enjoy the practice wouldn’t. Of course, what actually happened is that some players got caught in the crossfire — players who didn’t really enjoy gear swapping or want to carry around an extra set of MF gear all the time, but felt like they had to in order to be as efficient as possible.
So, when Wyatt says we “didn’t have a problem with it philosophically,” it means we were aware of the practice of gear swapping and understood that the player base had differing opinions on it, but didn’t want to make any changes to it unless the community asked for it outright (since we knew it was fun for a select group of players). It did not mean it was deliberately a practice we wanted to encourage everybody to do. Supporting and promoting gear swapping by adding a button would only complicate the current problem of players feeling like the they need to gear swap in order to be really efficient, even if they don’t enjoy it; it also increases the need for storage space (both server-side and in a player’s inventory) and adds complexity to a UI that’s otherwise designed to be very simple and straightforward.
So, more or less this:
“because it is the same issue we having right now? the idea is TO FIX PLAYERS SWAPPING TO MF GEAR BEFORE SOMETHING DIES. NOT MAINSTREAM IT.”
Right now, we’re opening discussion to the community on how best to move forward. We’re considering a lot of different solutions (some of which were pulled from ideas posted in these forums) and would like your feedback. We realize that there are pros and cons to every solution we listed, and want to get your take on them as well. If you have alternative ideas, please feel free to share them!
(By the way, saying that you’d prefer a button over the other options is totally valid feedback, but just keep in mind that our goal is to come up with a viable solution to the problem of players feeling like they need to gear swap even if they don’t actually feel like it’s fun gameplay.)
If you refer to our big post on this issue, you can see that the vote results… are wildly mixed, with “None of the above. Retain current system.” currently leading the field, though with only 26% of the total votes. If that’s not a recipe for a divided, divisive, and devouring community reaction to whatever change Blizzard ultimately elects to implement… I don’t know you guys at all.
Click through to see the ongoing vote, where you can put in your opinion if you haven’t already.
Which of Blizzard's proposed Magic Find changes do you prefer?
- 6) None of the above. Retain current system. (29%, 3,059 Votes)
- 4) Zero-Out Your MF% for 3 Minutes After Swapping Gear (26%, 2,740 Votes)
- 1) Set a Magic Find Cap (15%, 1,602 Votes)
- 2) Slowly Adjust Magic Find Over Time (11%, 1,202 Votes)
- 5) Gear Swapping Interacts with Nephalem Valor (9%, 909 Votes)
- 3) Use your average MF% or your lowest MF% of the last 5 minutes (5%, 547 Votes)
- 7) Some other new system I'll brilliantly explain in comments. (5%, 534 Votes)
Total Voters: 10,593
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As I said before I am all for setting a cap only if they increase NV to compensate so this way it is a buff to everyone but it would also put the ball in the court of those who go all out dps since increase NV MF and kill speed would dominate all.
How does the cap help though? The only thing it does is that I have to swap less gear to MF. An improvement overall, but not quite the solution.
“maybe buff up NV stacks with additional magic find”
If they do that then I hope they expand NV to the other difficulties. I am taking it very slow and haven’t played past act1 hell and would not like to have my MF “nerfed” compared to inferno players.
NV starts when you hit level 60. Doesn’t matter where in the game you are, though I have not confirmed normal/nightmare as I have no reason to take a level 60 back to these difficulty settings. All of Hell difficulty is a joke when you have a level 60 that can solo Inferno Act 1.
Yes, you can gain NV stacks in Nightmare and Hell if you are 60. I guess in Normal too. Also, I am currently carrying a MF set in inventory but rarely switch because I am too busy trying not to die. I think that a gear switch button might be interesting. Otherwise, I hope that changing your gear is not going to affect your NV.
Yes you can get NV in normal. I was running someone and was getting NV stacks.
Still a MF “nerf” for all non 60 characters… if they did it like that.
Why don’t they just have what Diablo II had? Didn’t you just hit W or something and you had a totally different set of armor/weapons on? Why don’t they just do that?
W simply swapped your weapon slots. So if you had a 2 hander, and pushed W, you could switch to a sword/shield… the rest of your armour was not capable of swapping using W.
Because that doesn’t solve anything.
The problem is that A) people feel the need to gear swap in order to be efficient, B) the actual process of gear swapping is not fun. Making it easier to gear swap doesn’t make people feel any less of a need to gear swap – quite the opposite, actually – so the problem remains until a better solution is presented.
In short, the challenge is to find a solution that applies to both A and B, not just one of them.
In my opinion there wouldn’t be as much gear swapping if you could maintain in certain area’s of Inferno with strictly magic find gear on the whole time. I think they should change the NV buff a bit to compensate for this.
I think there should be a new graphical interface added just for magic find gear, or button in your character screen (similar to the Nephalem Cube & Cauldron of Jordan). Inside this Cube or whatever is where you can equip your Magic Find gear. Clicking this Cube will cause a 2 second cast time similar to town portal, but instead of just switching gear it would take up all the attributes of your regular dps-gear + the MF% total on your MF set.
This is where the NV stacks can come into play, make it so you can only synthesize your Magic Find with your regular gear when you have at least 1 or a full stack of NV (or only take a % of the MF% off your MF set depending on how many stacks you have). This way you have to work to maintain the stacks in order to utilize the Magic Find gear and will lose the “synthesize” bonus if you lose the NV buff.
With how tough maintaining in Inferno can be with just regular gear i feel this is a decent way to make use of Magic Find, in D2 you could just slap on MF gear on a sorc and still produce good dps because of the way they had their Attribute System and Skill Point system designed. Plus this “synthesize” approach still gives you the feeling of customizing your Magic Find gear, just throwing an idea out there.
The challenge is simple to solve: Just measure the (ingame-)time an item was worn and increase mf provided by the item accordingly, letting the curve run out at about 1.5 times the original amount after wearing the items longer than 24 hours. Thus swapping is still usable, but is not feeling to be mandatory anymore.
I dont gear swap currently and I dont care if other people do. Why should everyone have MF nerfed because a small percentage of people are swapping gear? If they want to go to that much trouble let them, it has no impact on me… but potentially nerfing MF does. I havent even explored loading up on MF yet, i would like to eventually.
I choose 7 and this is my solution :
Remove the MF from all items and allow players to stack Nephalem valor no matter which level your character is.
Like this you have to kill elite anyways, and the item swapping isn’t required, because you earn MF by fighting mobs
Just take MF off gear and use NV only!! If you really must keep it make a specified charm slot where you can carry one charm.which holds all your MF (a random amount from fixed quota). The charms can help GF or MF, but nothing else and no other equiptment carries GF or MF. Sorted!
And thus “vanillarizing” items even more.
Cap MF, but allow NV to stack to the cap (ex: 15 stacks). That way, gear swap only help before you reach the cap by killing elites.
I prefer setting a MF cap, with NV getting you half way to the cap. That will allow those who want to MF set switch to continue to do so, and get some benefit for it, but it also limits the need to balance MF into every piece of gear. If you find one or two ultimate pieces that are both DPS/Survial with MF, those pieces will get you closer to the cap and reduce the need for MF gear swapping.
My ideal game-play would be that it only takes two or three fantastic pieces of MF gear to reach the “ideal” MF level for efficient farming. Once you get those “ultimate” pieces, you eliminate the need for ANY gear swapping because you’ve reached the cap with 5 stacks of NV.
Why are they focusing on this? Swapping MF gear is not why people are leaving the game.
My impression is ONE of the reasons people are leaving the game is that they’re finding the endgame item hunting / grinding unsatisfying and unsustainable. I believe Blizzard feels that swapping MF gear is a source of SOME of the unsatisfying game play.
Please note those words in caps. “ONE of the reasons” and “SOME” of the unsatisfying game play. I believe there is a team of people focusing on many aspects of the game. One of those aspects is the current state of MF
They can do more than 1 thing at a time. Some things are easier/harder to fix than others, and thus will come sooner/later.
Sure a good question !
I feel that people doing MF gear swapping is a real minority of players. And I still don’t see why this “issue” (which is not one in fact) should be fixed.
If people want to change their gear well they can do it already and I don’t see no reason why the way to do it should be changed.
Furthermore I really wonder if “the people quiting” the game have gone so far as farming inferno and swapping gear.
Agreed. There are so many other glaring issues. At this point in time, why focus on the fact that a subset of the people playing the game are feeling they have to switch to other gear right before a kill. Isn’t this more of a personal problem really ? I guess they’ll try and tackle this since they somewhat admitted in between the lines that most obvious deep-rooted issues are basically unfixable.
I like the “average MF over the last 5 minutes” as a vague concept, but it’s really confusing as a user experience. So, I’d like to see:
Hitting a monster imbues the monster with a bit of your current MF.
So, if I take a champion to 10% health with 100% MF, it gets +90% MF. Then, if I switch to gear with 1000% MF to kill it, that last 10% gives it +100%. It dies with a net 190% MF boost. It’s weighting the player’s MF by their damage to the monster, which they can show in the UI (if they even need to) with a monster particle effect, or something by the health bar. And unlike all the other options, “charging” a monster up actually feels like a game, not an arbitrary limit.
edit: didn’t meant to reply to this post.
I like this variation the best though