Loot -- Be Careful of What You Wish For

[Archon_Wing]

Oh, I was busy editing more and more crazy ideas into my OP, but it seems people have replied. It's nice to know you guys remembered that Diablo 2 was not just "get rushed to hell by someone with ill gotten gear, and sit around in Baal runs while someone with ill gotten gear levels you, and you can finally trade for your own tainted gear" If that is truly their idea of fun, then I'd rather not have any.

We must consider the very nature of Diablo 3 Magic Finding, aka the farming of "lewt" is slower paced than that in Diablo 3. In Diablo 2, there were several easy ways to farm. Note that a lot of the battle.net forum pundits probably didn't do this and cheated instead, proving even these were too hard for them but alas...

1.) Grab your best AOE ability and shoot it around in a dense area with a lot of slow monsters. Pindle and the Hell Cows would have many sad stories to tell you.
2.) Teleport/Run like an idiot til you find a chump of an Act Boss. Before he dies, put on 1000 MF, and make sure your stash isn't clogged with cracked bardiches. I recieved a letter from Meph, that the Lord of Hatred finally learned to walk around the moat, but I ceased to care.

In general, it was fast, because D2 monsters were usually weaker, and we'd have stories of people doing dozens of runs in an hour. In Diablo 3, most of the monster killing is centered around elites, and as everyone knows, even overgeared people can't just roll them over all the time. Even a single easy elite fight require far more precision than doing dozens of meph runs, much less any of the harder combos.

Thus, we don't have the same adrenaline rush of mowing down a load of easy to kill minions and hope they drop stuff. Before 60, watching the exp bar climb was sufficient, but white monsters drop crap usually. I see people running past trash mobs, and that just feels off. And then comes the whole MF swapping again because people are desperate to see drops. This is also why gold find is so popular-- you can beat up trash mobs for them.

Blizzard needs to be a bit more imaginative when it comes to fixing this. To me, the only way to fix it is to allow weapon swapping via W like in D2 so that people who don't want the tedium can just press a button, and allow MF on weapons. But... Nerfing MF would be the least creative way to do it. There's been too many nerfs-- buff alternate options instead. Consider a elite kill with 5 stacks. 2 people do it, one has 0 MF and the other has 200

Person 1: 100% base + 75% NV+ 0% MF =175%
Person 2: 100% base + 75% NV+200% mf= 375%

Person 2 would about 2x the better "quality". Let's just leave that as an abstraction for now.

375 / 175 = 2.14

But... let's say you can have 6 valors
No MF Guy: 100% base + 90% NV+ 0% MF =190%
Mf Guy: 100% base + 90% NV+200% mf= 390%

390 / 190 = 2.05
Gap is closing right? And the 0 MF guy can usually kill faster. Though the MF guy will be ahead for the first few valor kills, I just slightly closed the gap between having mf and not and everyone gets better drops still!

But allowing infinite valors is boring, so I'd suggest:

-- Max 7 valors
-- When you kill an elite with max valors, you get 20% of receiving a temporary MF buff like with a fortune shrine. You can't find an elite pack possibly in that time, so you're best off... running as fast as you can killing whatever you can.
-- If you kill 25 packs in the same act your valors become permanent bar skill swaps or leaving the game. That means you can go to the next act, and burn through the game if you want.
-- Disconnecting doesn't remove valors, but this protection is only allowed once every 48 hours to prevent active exploits. You also lose the valor if you change quests-- or change from multiplayer to single, or vice versa.