MP0 is the Best for Everything?
Posted 15 November 2012 by FluxSo suggests a fan (forgetting about key farming) in the B.net forums, which draws a philosophical reply from a CM.
Grimiku: The goal of
Monster Power is to give players the ability to scale up how challenging enemies are in each difficulty and, in return, get some pretty cool bonuses to adventure stats as well as the opportunity to earn bonus items. Different players have different play styles, though, so we added 10 power settings so you could decide what challenge level is best for you. For some, MP5 might be best. For others, MP1 or MP2 feels right. If you’ve got a lot of supporting gear, maybe MP7 or MP8 is your so-called “sweet spot.”
What we didn’t want to do, however, is make players feel like they absolutely needed to play at the higher MP levels in order to get the best rewards. This is one of reasons that we didn’t add in Achievements for Monster Power, too. We wanted the primary motivation to be the challenge and finding a level that you enjoy. I gather from your post that you feel the bonuses given for challenging yourself aren’t really worth the effort, but my question is what would you change about it? (Keeping in mind that we don’t want to force players into the higher MP levels.)
So is MP0 really the best for everything? Yes, actually. It’s certainly the best for item hunting, providing you’re in Act Three or Four; in Act One or Two MP1 seems to be the best option, since it so greatly improves the odds of ilvl 62 and 63 drops. The fact that MP0 in Act Three is much easier than MP1 in Act 1 or 2 goes some distance towards explaining why many players consider the Act 3 “Alkazier run” the best item finding course in the entire game.
If you want much more detail on this, bring a snack and dive into this mega thread. I newsed it some weeks ago, but it’s grown greatly since then and it’s full of great info, with mathematical proofs of which MP level is the best. The general (though not unanimous) conclusion from that thread is that MP0 is the best choice for almost every class/build, since the blazingly-fast killing speed allows for more runs and kills in the same amount of time, which beats the slight bonuses to Magic Find from the MP bonuses.
The big exception is, of course, key hunting, since there the bonus from higher levels of Monster Power are huge and very tangible. For keys, and especially for the demonic organs, you want to play on the highest MP level you can hack; a sweet spot that will vary from character to character. (Or even higher, and ideally in a party for the added killing oomph.)
Incidentally, there’s a great deal of debate over how exactly the Bonus Item Drops function. They’re granted for playing on higher MP levels on Inferno, and most testers think the figures listed in Blizzard’s infographic (seen below) are much too low. Competing and overlapping theories abound (since no one but Blizzard can dig into the game code to find out the exact answers, as fans did with the D1/D2 programs) but there’s some consensus that the listed percentages might be checked when anything drops, (instead of just when an item drops) including potions, gold, etc. This would greatly increase the total number of “bonus” items found per game, and I encourage you to check the forum thread for the full debate.
Monster Power impact on Inferno difficulty.
It’s a side point, but I strongly doubt the “that’s why we didn’t make new achievements” part of the blue quote. Blizzard didn’t make any Achievements for Monster Power because the Achievements are handled by some Battle.net programers who are all busy with Pandaland and SC2HotS beta stuff. Or at least I hope so, since I can’t think of any other reasonable excuse why we didn’t get achievements added for Paragon Levels in v1.04, or anything at all (Monster Power, Infernal Machine, etc) in v1.05.
Thanks to Dethklok, my new DH is running multishot through Act3 MP0 alkaizer runs and it far surpasses ball lightning in my opinion.
If you have above 100k dps mp3-4 is the best for mp runs. Do not forget that many of us play in party, and the monsters die fast. That 100% on mf from mp 0 to mp4 is shows.
The best characters on streams(above 200k dps) are playing on mp 5 in solo games, elites die in max 7-8 sec which is very good.
for a 230k (unbuffed 190k) dps dh mp 0-1 is best for exp and item farming.
many typos in this article Flux
Yeah, I just woke up and looked and was like, “wut?” Posted this like 2 hours after bedtime, when I was basically typing with eyes closed. Might have been ill-advised…
For my 300k dps buffed archon wiz mp4 hits the sweet spot, elites die in 3-4sec and trash dies instantly, no reason really to go lower so saying mp0>all depends on gear.
Doesn’t MP0 prevent ilvl 63> items from rolling ilvl 63 affixes, or is that not an important consideration when it comes to farming?
Personally, I’d rather farm slightly slower and know that the items I do find have the chance of rolling the highest stats possible (I found 4 legendaries in less than hour yesterday, at least one of which was ilvl 62 but had an ilvl 63 affix).
With this patch ilvl 63 affixes will spawn on any ilvl item provided the monster that drops the item is level 63. Monsters in A3 mp0 are level 63.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/6679558918
True, I hadn’t considered that. I enabled MP1 for A1 runs in this patch, but then went over to A3 for a few weeks and forgot why I had enabled MP1 in the first place.
That is a very important thing to have in mind but it’s not quite as easy:
The iLvl63 items will always roll with iLvl63 affixes, if You are lucky enough to get an iLvl63 item, but the major thing is that if You don’t enable MP You will have much less chance of finding an iLvl63 item. When MP is disabled, there will be more levels of items on the roll and therefore the chance of getting an iLvl63 item is small. The Monster Power system will remove the lowest level items and thereby increasing the chance of getting iLvl63 items. You will (with MP1-10) also getting drops that are calculated based on the monsters You kill, rather from a strict randomization. That means that if You kill a level 63 monster, You will have a very good chance of getting an iLvl63 item.
There’s a lot of misinformation here. It’s actually much simpler:
In Inferno, before the MP system a) items had set probabilities to drop at given levels that varied in Act I, Act II, and Acts III-IV; and b) all item stats were based on item level.
Since the MP system, all inferno monsters drop items with *random affixes* based on monster level instead of item level (provided monster level is equal or higher) and *base stats* based on item levels. In addition, activating the MP system (MP 1 or higher) makes all monsters level 63 and gives the item level tables from old Act III-IV.
Since all Act III monsters are lvl 63 anyway, on Act III and above using monster power changes nothing, because the stat roles are part of the core patch not limited to MP.
In Act I or Act II you need to use MP 1 to get everything to be lvl 63.
Sentarius is entirely correct.
The funny thing is that this is how affix drops always worked in D1 and D2 anyway: the affixes depended (indirectly) on the mlvl of the monster you will killing.
In D3, initially they made affixes depend only on the ilvl of the item, so that’s why anything that was ilvl 61 or lower was almost guaranteed to be trash, simply because they couldn’t access the higher level affixes.
I have a theory that MP1 is the “switch” for much better chances on legendary drops, no matter how much “conventional” MF or Valor stacks you have.
That is not correct – the legendary drop rate is flat (8%?) and there is nothing that will change that droprate. You can play at any MP level and the droprate is the same. You can turn the MP off and the droprate is the same.
Magic Find and Valor stacks has NOTHING to do with legendary droprate! MF and NV is only controlling the quality of the affixes (of all type of items) and if the items is going to be rare, magic, white or gray. Legendary is calculated BEFORE magic find/nv stacks are taken into consideration.
So, when an item drops, the system does the following:
1) Should the drop be a legendary? Flat chance of X%.
2) If the item was not to be a legendary – then roll for the type:Rare, Magic, White or gray. Use MF/NV to determine this.
3) When the type is settled; Then roll for the number of affixes. MF/NV is used to determine this.
4) When the number of affixes are settled; Roll for the value of each affix, again use the MF/NV.
Uh… this is explicitly untrue from the information listed on Blizzard’s site.
Legendaries are included in the set of tiers for which MF helps your roll — it runs from Legendary to 6/5/4/2/1 affix rares to magic items.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/game/guide/items/equipment#magic-find
Jup, MF & Valor increase the item’s potential magic quality (magic, rare, legendary). That was already the case in Diablo 2, and the devs said that MF in D3 works exactly the same way.
except it doesnt work EXACTLY the same… magic find in d2 didnt affect the amount of mods on a rare, or how GOOD the mods on said item were, all it affected was its rarity (color).
What is Jup?
Rushster, we need a downvote button.
To add to what Ivan E said, I’m also EXTREMELY skeptical of a base Legendary drop rate that’s anything higher than 1-2%, and in all likelyhood, it’s probably 1% or lower. If it were truly 8%, then that means people with 300% MF would have a 32% chance of rolling a Legendary, just a skosh under 1/3. Not a chance. At 2%, it would raise to 8%, which is roughly 1/13 (technically 12.5, but you can’t “half roll” an item lol,) and even THAT seems high.
Yeah, 8% is bonkers high. That’s probably closer to the base rate for blue items from a regular dude. I’ve seen 1/2000 bandied about as a possible drop rate for legendaries – or 0.05% – which seems about right; at 375% MF, that comes out to 0.1875%, or about 1 in every 533 drops. (Remember, not every monster drops something – when a monster doesn’t drop anything, that doesn’t factor into these equations.) I get a legendary / set about once every 3 runs, give or take, and I’d estimate I’m killing about 500 monsters a run. Those numbers feel right to me, though I don’t have any hard evidence that they jive. (I haven’t been keeping notes. Maybe I will to see how it pencils out.)
This is a rather bold statement that shouldn’t be thrown around without some research backing it up. Otherwise we get superstition.
I’ve got 200k dps with my good gear and 125k dps with Cain’s set.
I run with Cain’s set in Archon form on mp1. With 200k I can run on mp5, but even though elite die fast, they don’t die fast enough for me. That’s why I run on low mp.
Almost OT: If someone else is having problems only with elites (a.k.a. they don’t die instantly) at a certain MP, equip a SoJ and drop 1 MP (if you’re wearing 2 godly rings). You’re DPS will likely fall, but your kill speed vs elites might improve. SoJ helps to fix the kill speed gap between trash/elites.
Personally, I’m running for MF-ish/XP-ish on MP0 act3. Faster run times with cheap lacunis (I use them for Mov. Speed), fast (really fast, not “faster”) elite kills with cheap SoJ, etc.
Imo, since I’m nowhere near of being able to do ubers at MP5+ (maybe I’ll have to change every single piece of gear to do so… Just “maybe”…), I don’t see a point on doing Uber runs right now.
The fact I don’t really like any “build” of any class doesn’t help me on higher MP. And the price of gear to not insta-die against reflect damage MP5+ isn’t exactly tempting…
I’d say the “sweet-spot” really depends on what class you’re playing and how much mf you have. For barbs MP0 is obviously best, as they just run through anything and it dies when they pass by, even elites… Except with godly gear, where mobs die just as fast in mp1 or maybe even 2 so movementspeed is still the only limiting factor.
With my monk I can’t do that, because I can’t use tempest rush indefinitely at the same time as I kill on contact (yet, getting closer to this…) so mp1-3 is a little better.
Also, the more MF your character has the less you gain from the extra mf on higher MP. Compare a character with 0 mf and one with 300 and let’s say that you’d get one legendary/set per round without even neph stacks. On MP0 with neph stacks, the character with 0 MF would get 1.75 legendaries, and on MP 3 he’d get 2.5 legendaries. The guy with 300 MF would get 3.75 legendaries on MP0 and 4.5 on MP3. Relative to what the two character get on MP0, the high mf character gains much less extra from playing on higher MP. So with higher paragon lvl it gets even better with playing on low MP as you do almost get the same amount of legendaries in the end but in much less time
This ofc only applies if you can do a run on lower MP faster than one on higher MP…
Seems like a fundamental flaw there to me!
I would like them to solve the problem with more monsters (not weaker) in higher MP! But that ain’t happening
I kinda disagree with this philosophy.
If you can run mp4 or 5 with minimal changes to efficiency compared to mp0, why not do it? Especially to get higher chance for 6-property rares due to higher MF.
Efficiency
meaning I will get maybe the same amount of legendaries with alot less effort – and alot more gold in the exact same time as you if you run on mp3 and me on mp 0 – it is just fact…At least this is how it works fore me << and I usually do public games….items drop like crazy in those.
shynta you misunderstanding what he means by efficiency, in this game it time to kill a mob so in this case it normally means that your still killing 99% of mobs in 1 hit.
Since your both killing X mobs a second the guy on a higher MPlvl will get more gold and more items and better quality items.