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And that's the point I made in the original post. Unless they buff drop rates in Act 2/3/4, Act 1 will be the best farming spot by a substantial margin. I don't want to be stuck doing Act 1 or Act 2 goblins for maximum efficiency. I want to be able to do Whimsyshire/Act 3 at the same effectiveness as Act 1. You don't need to make those acts easier, but their drop rates need to be equal after the loss of magic find is figured into the equation.

Yes, if you kill 100 elites in Act 1 and 100 elites in Act 3, you will get a lot more items from Act 3. But I'm basing my theory on the hp ratio between acts. Act 3 has roughly 3.5x the amount of health of Act 1; therefore, you can assume that it takes 3.5x more time to kill elites in Act 3, leading to 3.5x less elites killed in an hour, two hours, etc...I'm looking at the amount of rares received per minute/hour/day/whatever.

If you have the same magic find in both acts, you'll get roughly the same amount of ilvl 63 items assuming you kill elites 3-4x faster in Act 1. This is why nerfing gear-swapping without altering drop rates will hurt Act 2/3/4 farming viability. It's unrealistic to be farming with the same amount of magic find in Act 1 as in Act 3. If you can farm Act 3 with 200 magic find, then you should easily be able to farm Act 1 with 300 magic find.

If you don't expect to get as much loot from Act 3 because of having lower magic find, then what's the point of having Act 2/3/4 Inferno? With your philosophy, Act 1 is and will be the end-all farming spot until you get to 446 magic find(or whatever the max value is) on top of your dps suit.

Quote from Bilge

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I'm not talking about farming Act 1 with 200 mf vs farming Act 1 with 0 mf. It's about farming Act 1 with 200 mf while farming Act 3 with 0 mf. Since Act 3 requires much higher stats to clear than Act 1, the amount of magic find on your gear will be greatly reduced. Once you're farming Act 3 with less magic find than in Act 1, Act 3 becomes a less effective farming spot. Thus rendering Act 2/3/4 farming less efficient unless a person uses no magic find or has the maximum magic find.

I don't see the problem with this. This is how MF is suppose to be. Of course your going to get less gear if you have less MF.

Actually, you'll get more i61+ rares farming act 1 with 0 MF than farming act 3 with 0 MF (and high dps / surv).

The fact you can get away with stacking a ton of MF in act 1 is jut gravy on top of the biscuit.

The problem with this is that act 4 should provide the highest chance of getting the best items, not act 1.

Exactly. Right now, the game punishes you for not being able to use magic find in Act 3. Instead, I think the game should reward the player for using that kind of gear. If you're not using a high amount of magic find in Act 3, then you're being punished by receiving less drops than you would in Act 1. It should be that you get equal amounts of gear in Act 3 with little/no magic find and then get rewarded for being able to stack magic find on top of those survival stats.

I'm not talking about farming Act 1 with 200 mf vs farming Act 1 with 0 mf. It's about farming Act 1 with 200 mf while farming Act 3 with 0 mf. Since Act 3 requires much higher stats to clear than Act 1, the amount of magic find on your gear will be greatly reduced. Once you're farming Act 3 with less magic find than in Act 1, Act 3 becomes a less effective farming spot. Thus rendering Act 2/3/4 farming less efficient unless a person uses no magic find or has the maximum magic find.

The math is just a loose example of the effects of nerfing gear swapping without buffing drop rates. I know that if I didn't do any of that, I would get even more 'stop whining about the nerf' than I already am.

I probably could, but it's absolutely not worth it.

Oh, I simplified the math a ton. I pretty much made mf a linear function(and it's probably not). But the core argument I'm trying to make is that once you're farming in Act 3 with less magic find than in Act 1, your potential drop rates will be lower. And I did a simplistic analysis of the guaranteed rare in some post somewhere in this thread. And the constant kill rates was assumed since the magic find value decreases as you proceed to harder acts. For example, you could farm Act 1 in 25k dps, 200 mf gear and Act 2 in 50k dps, 100 mf gear. This is ignoring intangible things like the space between elites and natural monster abilities.

We're not talking about killing small amounts of elites in a 2 day period of time. In say a month, a year; the amount of drops you receive will get closer and closer to drop rate posted by Blizzard. That's why you use averages to figure out where to farm. It gives you the best idea of what should have the best rates of ilvl 63 items.

I know that the effect of magic find is not linear as was assumed in my equation. However, that is irrelevant since the only time when Act 1 and Act 3 will be equal is when equal amounts of mf is used, thus cancelling the multiplier on both sides of the equation. Any extra magic find used in Act 1 will tilt the scales in favor of earlier acts even if the benefit of magic find is only 5% more rares per 100 mf.

I'm not sure how I said something silly when the second line of the first post says this:

I said in like the first line of the post that this thread is not about the fairness or unfairness of gear swapping. And then I proposed my solution of buffing later drop rates to counterbalance the nerf. Try reading the thread next time please.

I farm Whimsyshire to get my money. I probably get 5m profit on an average day. Then I find some items worth a lot more like a helmet I sold fast for 15m the other day.

I too don't farm in Act 1. But that's because right now, as long as you can kill fast enough, Act 1 and Act 3 are roughly on even ground in terms of ilvl 63 drops. But once that gear swap nerf hits, I'll have to choose between farming Act 1 with 200 magic find, or doing Whimsyshire with maybe 50-100 magic find. I'd much, much prefer farming in a different location for the same drop rates as Act 1, but it becomes less and less viable without equal levels of magic find.