MF is the only difficulty slider in this game

"

Nightprowler wrote:

All the way through Lunaris lv 3 in 1 min? The only way that's possible if huge speed inc flask and pure luck choosing the right direction. They aren't all that fast.

Easily possible to run from floor 2, to peity in 1min. I usually can do a run in 2-4mins including kill.

And for the pure luck part, not really, I usually only run peity from lvl 68-80 and I have learned the map. Unfortunately It cant always be THAT random.

So I ran 185 iir and 50 iiq last night rushing a friend of mine through act 1 and 2 merc farming ledge and fellshrine for a couple hours total and we found 7 uniques, 1 ex, and lots of lesser currency and bags upon bags of rares. I just don't find those kinds of numbers with 0/0 mf, and I can't run with that gear at level 75 content doing piety/maps because my build is too nerfed. So it's really something that can only be experienced by farming lower content, or living VERY dangerously on high level content. I think with that setup I had pretty close to negative resists because I was wearing my Andy ring, and my dps was only 7k instead of 10k, and my life was 2400 down from 3300. So just not viable for even piety runs. But it's faceroll for farming fellshrine. I mean we were tripping over rares dropping from trash mobs, and a champ/yellow mob was a guaranteed 2-3 rares per kill. Lots of currency too from the 50% iiq. Can't imagine running with 400iir/100iiq or whatever like sporkers/summoners do.

So again it's like ok I can run lots of mf and play lower level faceroll-content basically farming for trash uniques/currency, or travel through a wasteland of high level content gaining xp but little else. I'm just not sure why it has to be that way. I can run a level 72 map on my mara with little to no iir/iiq and I will find little. The boss will drop 2-3 rares, but that's about it. Mainly I keep my eye open for 5-6L whites and currency. If I load up the MF to around 100/40, I risk death and at level 82, it represents an increasing penalty of time to gain back the xp loss.

Even in maps with the mf bonus for 6 players, it's really noticeable if you are running without a culler. It's just a sea of white and blue drops which is surprising because I would think 6 players would be bumping up the iir a lot just on their own from the player bonus, but it doesn't seem to be the case?

Not sure what the solution is, obviously it's a case of trying to cram the toothpaste back into the tube at this point with all the mf items out there in the game, and I don't really know if GGG even has the will to do anything about it, or even if a majority of players would like it changed in the first place?

I sympathize with the OP.

The game of optimizing gets twice as complex
when your trying to stuff MF onto every item you can
and maintain combat stats.

It adds a layer to the complexity, and for us... arpg people?
you know we are here because of that complexity. In fact this
is one of the more complex arpg's. I keep optimizing and
grinding for gear in this ga... oh... oh now I get it.

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Maelthor wrote:

I've been playing ARPG's since Diablo 1, and one thing that I just don't get, is why MF as a item stat needs to be in these games at all. PoE has taken it to the extent that the entire endgame is itemized using MF as the variable to control difficulty. Why is that? Can't a difficult encounter or zone be difficult because the monsters are hard to kill and deal lots of damage? Shouldn't gear/builds/skill be the deciding factor? Basically, shouldn't the guy with the biggest stick and the strongest armour kill the boss easier?

Alas no...doesn't work that way at all.

Many of us have been complaining about IIR/IIQ for a long time.
This thread is nothing new.

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Maelthor wrote:

Let me use an example from last night to explain where i'm coming from. I have a LA ranger, I play basically self-found or I do the odd trade between my RL friends when we party together, so I am not going around with auction house type gear. But that being said, I do ok when I spec for dps. about 10k frenzy, 2k LA, I have 3500 life, capped resists, yadda yadda yadda. Sadly, I have only 30% iir and no iiq except I can weapon swap to a cull stick and finish off a mob with the iir/iiq gems. But basically i'm going around killing 99% of mobs with 30 iir. As anyone knows who has ran with that level of mf vs say, even 100+ iir and 30-50 iiq, the difference is incomparable. It's like playing two different games. With the former you are in a wasteland, the latter, it's christmas every day. So ok, you are saying, just get more mf. And so I did, I played gear tetris to try and swap to a bunch of stuff like Goldwyrm and Aursize and also a couple rings with mf on them, but guess what happens? I lose hundreds of life, I lose a ton of evade/armour, I struggle to cap resists, and my frenzy dps drops by 2000. I've nerfed my own character to the point where the same dungeon I ran yesterday with ease is now considerably more dangerous.

That's pretty rubbish dps for endgame to be honest.
Back in OB I dropped from 40k to 16K on EK to gain a few hundred IIR and about 100-150 IIQ.
Mostly that was dropping damage support gems for IIR and IIQ gems, but also changing gear.

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Maelthor wrote:

So I ask...why? I have better gear sitting in my stash! Way better, perfectly optimized gear with no mf on it. When am I going to use it? Never, except maybe if I hop into a public game with someone who is the designated mf culler. Makes no sense to me. So now I have to try and find gear that does the same thing my other gear did, only also has mf on it....

Back in diablo2 it was the same, I'd to meph/baal/pindle runs etc wearing 600 mf worth of gear and find great stuff that I would put in my stash for later, and later never came, because it had no mf on it. Silly.

And then there are Maps. The entire Map system is based on trying to manipulate the variables on what is basically a magic item, so that it has enough iiq bonus on it to make it worth running, while not having lethal variables that will kill you with your crappy mf gear on. Same idea basically. Using mf as a difficulty slider.

I don't know why GGG doesn't just scrap mf as an item stat, make encounters difficult based on their level, make drops balanced according to the difficulty of said encounters and let us wade into battle with the gear that kills things fastest and keeps us alive the longest.

Anyway that's my $0.00002 :)

In anything but high end maps, where you need to make the most out of each one, clearing twice as fast is the same as having twice as much MF.
High magic find on a character with poor dps and as fragile as porcelain won't actually net more profit per hour than a solid build that can tank and clear super quick.

I say this because I have been anti-MF builds since I started at playing in early OB, and I have never had a problem accumulating currency and good items.

[/quote]
That's pretty rubbish dps for endgame to be honest.
Back in OB I dropped from 40k to 16K on EK to gain a few hundred IIR and about 100-150 IIQ.
Mostly that was dropping damage support gems for IIR and IIQ gems, but also changing gear.

Rubbish dps for a self-found player? I doubt that, but this being the internet there's always someone who will come along and say i'm wrong. My 82 mara does around 17k dps heavy strike and 13k ground slam using a Meatgrinder which I feel fortunate to have found, that does 380 damage and has 1.43 attack speed. Upgrades to something like that don't come along very often for a self found player especially when i'm struggling with my rubbish dps to support the iir/iiq to find them :)

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Maelthor wrote:

That's pretty rubbish dps for endgame to be honest.
Back in OB I dropped from 40k to 16K on EK to gain a few hundred IIR and about 100-150 IIQ.
Mostly that was dropping damage support gems for IIR and IIQ gems, but also changing gear.

Rubbish dps for a self-found player? I doubt that, but this being the internet there's always someone who will come along and say i'm wrong. My 82 mara does around 17k dps heavy strike and 13k ground slam using a Meatgrinder which I feel fortunate to have found, that does 380 damage and has 1.43 attack speed. Upgrades to something like that don't come along very often for a self found player especially when i'm struggling with my rubbish dps to support the iir/iiq to find them :)

Yeah man, dont mindhim. It's not too bad. I do about 10k DPS with my groundslammer, but was built for HC so a l ot of survivability. Only thing which would improve my DPS atm I think is a 6L and a pDPS belt, but considering I'm playing with a 5L with about 450 pDPS (+50 eDPS) you are definatly not doing too shabby!!

edit : also better gems would make a difference