Sirian's First Impression

[Sir_Die_alot]

Now if the game is such that you can just stack magic find and stomp through all the difficulties without worrying about your other stats then that isn't an issue with magic find, but with the difficulty balance the developers have given it. The talk seems to be that some difficulties in D3 will be very tough though. The developers have said "You will die" right? So how do you balance the fact that you will die with finding room to fit magic find on your gear? I think that will be quite enjoyable to find out.

This reminded me that the attribute 'gold find' is on gear also. In D2 this was a pretty much worthless stat since the gold itself was only of minimal value to 95+% of the players (minor amount needed for any repairs). In D3 the gold is not something that is easily lost in piles when you die like in D2 and the repairs can escalate up quite a bit. There are also some fairly large sinks for the gold that have you wanting quite a lot of it. These are things like upgrading your vendors for being able to make better quality items for you and increasing the size of your shared stash (50k to 100k and up as you increase its size).

You and Swirly do have a point, and I leaft out gold find without even thinking about it, because as you point out, it wasn't an important stat in D2 because of the amount of gold that dropped. I still see both stats as kind of a cursed stat that again does nothing for the game. The game could easily, probably MORE easily, be balanced around available gear rather than some presumed amount of magic find.

You guys also got into farming toons. Having a farming toon is probably where I'm going with this. Blizzard should be focusing on making a farming toon unnecessary because that's time away from a toon you would want to be playing. It's the circle of un-fun again. You play a farming toon that isn't necessarily your favorite because they can stack the magic (or gold) find to support playing the toon you actually want to play. To go back to using WoW examples, imagine if you HAD to raid as a mage you don't like to get your favorite rogue loot.

Honestly this is what I see happening when D3 goes live and these issues have had some time to resolve themselves: Blizzard has already said magic find will average, so weaker classes are going to stack magic find and kind of play the chump to a group of the stronger classes. If you ever played a bowazon or pally early in D2 you remember how they were kind of joined at the hip for hell act 4 leveling. A paladin with concentration aura (and another with fanaticism if possible) would tag along with amazons and because of the way bows and auras were bugged in conjunction it made both hell 8 player viable. Maybe with some luck the class I like will be the champ not the chump so my distaste for magic find won't exactly matter.