If you're going to account for the travel time in Act 1, then you must also factor in the monster types. Act 3 has Soul Rippers/Lashers, Winged Moloks, Spearmen, perma-fast Demonic Tremors, Phasebeasts, etc...What's the most annoying monster in Act 1? Enraged Phantoms maybe just because they have a weird pathing AI. Even though I'm overgeared for Act 3 right now, I'm terrified of demonic tremor elites because for some reason, they can move faster than my DH. Even if you run across some absurd affix combination in Act 1, you're probably not going to be fazed because the difficulty is so much lower.
That being said, even when gear-swapping is nerfed, I'll still probably continue to farm Whimsyshire despite what I think about drop rates. I can't bring myself to go back to Act 1 farming ever again.
How would you like me to factor that in? And by the way, I travel faster in Act 1 since I can switch in vault:tumble. And monster types favors Act 1 by a huge margin. You got enemy damage which favors Act 1. It's probably in the favor of Act 3 that I'm not including that stuff.
1) My original point was that the drop rates between Act 1 and Act 3 are equal with the same amounts of magic find. But this is only possible with gear-swapping in the game(good or bad).
2) Yes Act 1 is easy, maybe too easy. Making it harder would certainly alleviate the issue of unequal drop rates with different amounts of magic find. But that would severely harm the amount of people who complete Inferno. More people would just up and quit if they couldn't break through the Act 1 wall.
3/4) I don't know what that has to do with what I said in the first post.
I run acts 1,2,3 with the same 290 mf without swapping and shit and i can assure you that it is possible. Also the drop rates might be equal but the ilvl is not.
yes, but your gear is way, way overkill for Act 1. You could likely drop a load of dps/hp/whatever for another 50-70 magic find. Though you are nearing the point where the differences between the acts is diminished.
Let's say you kill 20 elites in a regular run. I'll buy you that in Act 1, you can do so with 200mf, while in Act 3, you'll have 0. Fine.
Now, the NV gives you 75% mf, which means 275%mf in act 1, and 75%mf in act 3. Even more important, you have a guaranteed yellow drop. So, if your 20 elites give you 80 items, 20 of them are guaranteed rares, and the other 60 can be yellow, blue, or white. Let's say with 0% mf, you get 1 in 20 items to be a rare, for the sake of simplicity. That's 3 items. With 75% mf from NV, in act 3 you will have 5 rares. With 275% mf in act 1, you'd have 11 rares. Now add the 20 guaranteed rares from NV stack, and you'll get 25 rare items in act 3, and 31 rare items in act 1. The quality of drops, however, is much better in act 3. Around 4-5% of those will be level 63, in act 1, and around 16% of those will be lvl 63 in act 3. Which means 1-2 level 63 drops in act 1, in his example, and 4-5 level 63 drops in act 3 in this example.
Of course this is an oversimplification, but it works to show you where is the flaw in your argument.
You forgot to calculate in the hp ratios between Act 1 and Act 3. Without factoring in time traveled/monster types/mini-bosses, you should be killing 3-4x the amount of elites in Act 1.
I have said that I know mf isn't linear, but it's to prove a point. The effect is to a lesser extent, but it is still there. It will always be there unless you use equal amounts of magic find in Act 1 and Act 3. And I can farm Act 3 with magic find right now. I can probably get to 200 mf after nv pretty easily and still have whimsyshire under farm. But I will always know that I could be farming Act 1 with a 300 mf suit and be getting more drops.
The impossible is referring to farming Act 3 with as much mf as Act1. Even if you can roll through Act 3 with 200 mf, you can swap out some gear to achieve 250-300 mf to farm Act 1. Unless you're near the max mf attainable, there will be a difference between acts.
I think a lot of the issue boils down to how jarring the difficulty increase is in acts. Act 1 i can faceroll, killing elite packs in 3-5 seconds usually, go into act 2 and its challenging... its doable, but whats the point? A slightly increased drop rate? I'd rather sacrafice some stats in act 1 by putting on MF gear(not swapping for a kill, just straight up swapping) so that i can still kill quickly and survive easily, not have repair bills from dying, and get almost equal drop rates thanks to MF gear i can equip in act 1 that i can't use in act 2.
You'd probably end up getting more high rares from Act 1 because of the magic find you equipped. As long as you didn't utterly nerf your dps in order to get magic find, the increased drop rates in Act 2 probably aren't enough to off-set the difference.
1) My original point was that the drop rates between Act 1 and Act 3 are equal with the same amounts of magic find. But this is only possible with gear-swapping in the game(good or bad).
2) Yes Act 1 is easy, maybe too easy. Making it harder would certainly alleviate the issue of unequal drop rates with different amounts of magic find. But that would severely harm the amount of people who complete Inferno. More people would just up and quit if they couldn't break through the Act 1 wall.
3/4) I don't know what that has to do with what I said in the first post.
For me (55k DPS WD) it's currently about the same in terms of gear per hour between my Act 1 farm (295 MF Warrior's Rest Farm) and my Act 3 farm (with gear swap). I share your concern about what will happen after they nerf gear swapping because all it will do is make my Act 3 farming even less efficient.
Do keep in mind that they said if they make a change they will do something to offset the nerf (Possibly more NV MF or something along those lines).
Thank you for understanding the core issue. I did not know about Blizzard possibly off-setting the nerf because I make sure to stay far, far away from gear-swapping threads. I imagine that they all degenerate to flame wars(such as this one has) and I have better things to do than to sift through 700 pages of useless posts.
This topic is not about the legitimacy of gear-swapping. If you can farm Act 3 with 140 mf, then you can easily farm Act 1 with 200-250 mf, resulting in more efficient farming,
Magic find is not working as intended. When it is no longer viable to swap out gear, magic find will be working as intended.
so you think swapping from main to 2nd weaponslot (like dual ali-baba) in d2 was not intended?
ofc it is working as intended..you can swap but you dont need to...you can get mf gear allowing you to farm a3/a4 without swapping or just go and ignore mf and only rely on nv. the problem we have right now is that ppl complain, that they NEED to swap to get maximum efficiency. blizzard feels they need to fix it (i dont understand why tbh). after reading the dev post about it, it looks very much like they will continue their way of "fix = nerf" as they did with multiple farm spots (goblins, champs & elites etc.), chests, barrels etc. which already made gf and mf much less valuable. it's an easy and simple solution, but it surely isn't the best.
swapping gear before a rare / champ kill is annyoing, i also refused to do it for a long time. but i don't want to get rid of this annoyance at the cost of its useability!!!
also i dont see the whole point about a1/250mf and a3/0mf or whatever farming..you (OP) confess your whole math is broken and wrong just for the sake of simplicity, but as someone already stated it is not simple and therefor you can't compare it the way you do.
i did some act 1 runs myself (farming act 3 in a 4-man group most of the time) and i agree with others that is very boring after some time (no challenge) and i dont see the point of using 300+ mf just to get more rares of which most are <ilvl60..it's your own choice, but i prefer to do act 3 and swap gear..and i got the feeling it's a lot more profitable (in terms of ivl) than act 1.
The math is a lot more complex, but the simplified version is a more exaggerated effect of the gear swapping nerf. The difference between Act 1 and Act 3 may not be as large as a linear equation makes it out to be, but Act 1 will be better than Act 3 without equal levels of magic find. Unless they revamp the drop tables again, Act 1 will be greater than or equal to Act 3 in every scenario.
Of late, I've been buying unid rings/amulets(mostly rings) and identifying them. I've spent around 6-7m on the unid items and turned maybe 35-40m so far.
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That being said, even when gear-swapping is nerfed, I'll still probably continue to farm Whimsyshire despite what I think about drop rates. I can't bring myself to go back to Act 1 farming ever again.
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yes, but your gear is way, way overkill for Act 1. You could likely drop a load of dps/hp/whatever for another 50-70 magic find. Though you are nearing the point where the differences between the acts is diminished.
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You'd probably end up getting more high rares from Act 1 because of the magic find you equipped. As long as you didn't utterly nerf your dps in order to get magic find, the increased drop rates in Act 2 probably aren't enough to off-set the difference.
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2) Yes Act 1 is easy, maybe too easy. Making it harder would certainly alleviate the issue of unequal drop rates with different amounts of magic find. But that would severely harm the amount of people who complete Inferno. More people would just up and quit if they couldn't break through the Act 1 wall.
3/4) I don't know what that has to do with what I said in the first post.
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Thank you for understanding the core issue. I did not know about Blizzard possibly off-setting the nerf because I make sure to stay far, far away from gear-swapping threads. I imagine that they all degenerate to flame wars(such as this one has) and I have better things to do than to sift through 700 pages of useless posts.
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The math is a lot more complex, but the simplified version is a more exaggerated effect of the gear swapping nerf. The difference between Act 1 and Act 3 may not be as large as a linear equation makes it out to be, but Act 1 will be better than Act 3 without equal levels of magic find. Unless they revamp the drop tables again, Act 1 will be greater than or equal to Act 3 in every scenario.
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