Nephalem Valor, is it worth it?

[mistique]

Hey Guys,

Recently been farming items in the hopes (vain atm) of getting some good gear for inferno.
Now, i've grouped with a friend and gotten to outside Diablo to get the Inferno Staff of Herding.
Been getting 5 stacks of NV before going in, and as yet even with MF gear and +270 MF, have not seen a LE or descent item drop.
Is NV doing anything worthwhile, it seems to me that random is random, all the NV does is make it now likely to get Rares, garbage though they mostly are, perhaps that's the point and i'm missing it, but i'd have thought that with the increase in MF you'd have a better chance (not great) of seeing LE's or patterns drop.
And then, even with the patterns, their overly expensive to make for no return, i have the 6 property axe pattern, it costs 119+ k gold to make and a bunch of mats and though i've only made 2 and they were both vendored, so a couple of 100 gold returned for well over 120k each, what's the point?

[MonTy]

Hi mistique,

You'll want to read this: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/game/guide/it...magic-find

Nephalem Valor grants additional magic find (beyond the 300% cap), so it's very useful in determining the quality of item drops.

As a personal opinion I find Diablo 3 to have horrendously low drop rates. I've found a few legendary items after hundreds of hours worth of play. Reportedly people are finding legendary items every 10 or so hours with 300 MF and 5 Nephalem Valor stacks... but that's just from random posts I've seen on the net.

Good luck and be sure to read that link!

[mistique]

Interesting, but unless there is someplace that lists or somehow you can work out the drop % of different mobs it's not going to make any difference.
I have found a few LE's, when i was adventuring with out much MF at all i got 3 in about an hour, now i haven't seen one since, seems the drop rates must be very very low, not that that's a bad thing, but the high price of them on the AH, haven't checked the RMHA, is in the 10's on millions, prompting those who really really want the best gear to buy gold to get it, thus again relegating the whole experience to who can afford the most.
I prefer to play for the fun, which seems to be something that Blizzard has again forgotten.

[Archon_Wing]

It is very worth it. I only have like 13% native MF and a bit from paragon but I focus mainly on killing as many monsters as possible and occasionally gear swapping an mf ammy and boots. With 5 stacks you get a guaranteed yellow; sure most suck, but if you are in an area where you can mow down tons of elite packs, you will often get items worth keeping. Usually there's a few items that sell for 50k on a bad day.

Do act 3 if possible; the higher monster density+ much higher ilvl 63 rate (such as the crapload of spiders in the crater) gives you tons of exp and gold at the minimum with 5 NV. Also, since white monster drops were buffed, it makes it all the better.

If you're not wrecking the area you're farming, it'd advisable to sacrifice some mf for more combat power.

[ErickTheRed]

It's not very widely known, but my understanding is that the extra rare from NV is much more likely to have 4 affixes than others. Basically the bonus item is rolled normally, then replaced with a 4 affix rare if it isn't at that quality level or higher. This is from a post on Reddit.

Also, I believe the estimated base chance for a legendary to drop from a boss pack is around 1 in 500. Considering that a high fraction of legendary items still won't be that good, I wouldn't plan on farming up a bunch of them unless you plan to get a lot of Paragon levels. On the other hand, you don't really need the top end legendary items.