How Does Magic Find Work in Diablo 2 Resurrected? What About Item Drops?
The fundamental concept behind farming in Diablo 2 Resurrected appears to be fairly straightforward: since enemies leave behind loot when they are killed, increasing the number of enemies you kill will result in an increase in the amount of loot you obtain. The more quickly you are able to kill enemies, the more quickly you will amass loot.
Once you have found an item that has a “+X% Better Chance of Getting Magic Items” inscription on it, you may find yourself wondering how everything works in greater detail. Certain foes, on the other hand, drop more or different loot than others. This page will go into some detail about item drops, farming, and the Magic Find ability.
No Drops, along with Treasure Class
Remember that Diablo 2 Resurrected is a game that very much requires volume farming, no matter what your build is, how fast your kill rate is, what exactly you’re farming, or how high your Magic Find is. If you don’t care about the details and just want the quick overview, however, just keep in mind that this is the case regardless of any of those factors. Characters with a high Magic Find score have a greater chance of discovering higher-quality items (rare, set, and uniques instead of magical items) when killing Act Bosses.
This is because Act Bosses typically drop more magical items per kill than any other enemy. If you kill enemies in areas with a high Area Level (aLv), which is normally limited to a half-dozen dungeons in Hell difficulty, the variety of items that can drop will increase to include every item in the game. This effect can only be triggered once per playthrough.
Find a boss or dungeon that you are capable of running quickly and safely, and strike a good balance between how quickly you can kill enemies, how well you can survive, and how well you use magic. Locate the boss, then kill them, or complete the dungeon several hundred times over. Farming isn’t going to make you a lot of money if you stop before Nightmare Andariel; instead, you should focus on Nightmare/Hell Mephisto as your primary objective. Farmable zones include Hell difficulty’s Mausoleum, The Pit, Ancient Tunnels, and Chaos Sanctuary. All of these zones are in the same difficulty as Hell.
How Does Magic Find Work in Diablo 2 Resurrected? What About Item Drops?
The quality of the base item and the quality of the unique cannot always be assumed to be correlated with one another, despite the fact that this may be an appealing assumption to make. Always keep in mind that the base statistics of the item are less important than the modifiers that can be applied to them, with the exception of weapons, which tilt the balance a little bit more toward the former. Even though Elite items are harder to come by, there is no direct correlation between how useful an item is and how rare it is, and the Nightmare difficulty level has a lot of Exceptional items that are of a very high quality.
The game will check the “Treasure Class” (TC) of a drop source any time you kill an enemy or open a chest to see what kind of loot it will drop for you. It is not necessary to go into great detail in order to understand how drops work in a general sense. Suffice it to say that TCs are lists of possible drops, and that in general, the higher the Area Level (aLv) where a drop occurs, the more TCs will be checked.
The greater the number of TCs checked, the greater the likelihood of obtaining higher-tier loot; consequently, the higher the aLv, the higher the ceiling is for the quality of the loot. It is possible that lower-tier belts, such as sashes, will drop for you if you kill enemies in low-level areas while playing on Normal difficulty, but you will never get higher-tier belts, such as demonhide sashes or spiderweb sashes. These belts are unobtainable. If the standard item cannot roll, then neither can the magical, rare, set, or unique variants of that item.
How Does Magic Find Work in Diablo 2 Resurrected? What About Item Drops?
The most important thing to take away from this is that if you want an item of high quality, like the Spiderweb Sash that was mentioned earlier, you will have to look for buy D2 runewords in regions that have an appropriate amount of aLv. There are other factors that may increase the likelihood that particular foes will drop loot from particular TCs or another (for example, Wraiths have a greater chance of dropping Runes), but the correlation between higher area levels and a higher ceiling for the quality of loot is a strong one.
Normal, Champion, Unique, Super Unique and Boss Monsters
The information presented above relating to Treasure Class and NoDrops is primarily applicable to typical sources of loot drops, such as run-of-the-mill monsters and containers. To the player’s good fortune, the game is rife with powerful foes who, as their name implies, drop powerful loot. These formidable foes fall into one of four categories: Champions, Uniques, Super Uniques, or Bosses.
For the purposes of drops, Champions always drop a few potions and will very regularly drop a magical item, gem, rune, or falling that, gold. Champions consist of several variants (Berserker, Champion, Fanatic, Ghostly, Possessed), which are worth covering in detail elsewhere. However, for the purposes of drops, Champions will always drop a few potions.
Super Uniques are a type of static foe that are always present in certain parts of the game and always have some sort of static modifiers attached to them. For instance, Eldritch the Rectifier can always be found in the Frozen Highlands in Act 5 and always has the “Extra Fast” modifier. Similarly, Rakinishu can always be found in the Stony Field in Act 1 and always has the “Lightning Enchanted” modifier.
How Does Magic Find Work in Diablo 2 Resurrected? What About Item Drops?
This pattern continues throughout the game. Super Uniques, just like Uniques, have minions and will gain additional modifiers as the difficulty level increases from Normal to Nightmare and Hell. When Super Uniques are defeated, they will drop a number of potions in addition to two magical items (or a gem or rune), which makes them useful for farming, particularly when they spawn in close proximity to Waypoints.
Player Count and NoDrops are both required.
The number of players in the game has an effect on whether or not you receive a NoDrop tag when loot is spawned, but Magic Find does not. The precise NoDrop chance can change depending on the type of monster being faced, but there is one correlation that cannot be broken: the more players there are in the game, the lower the NoDrop chance will be. To reiterate, this does not necessarily improve the quality of the drops; rather, it merely increases the frequency.
Both the probability of having NoDrop reduced and the total number of players in the game do not scale in a linear fashion. When there is only one player participating in the game, the NoDrop rate is somewhere between 60 and 70% (depending on the source of the loot), but when there are two players, the NoDrop rate is reduced to 50%. You have seen the majority of the gains (10-20% NoDrop) at the Players 5 level, but even at the Players 3 level, the NoDrop rate has been reduced to a mere 25-35%. These are approximate numbers, not exact ones, and their purpose is to give you an idea of how the number of players affects the no-drop rate.
How Does Magic Find Work in Diablo 2 Resurrected? What About Item Drops?
As you can see, having even a small number of players participate in a game can result in the standard sources of loot being more generous. Note, however, that in order to receive the full benefit of NoDrop, you must be allied to the aforementioned players and be in close proximity to them. Players who are distant from one another or who are not allied with one another reduce the Player Count bonus by half; consequently, it is not significantly better to play a close 4-Player game as a lone player in an 8-Player game.
You could actually be in a worse position than if you were playing in a Players 1 game if the increased number of players is slowing down your kill rate. This is because enemies become more powerful as more people participate in a game. Last but not least, keep in mind that Uniques and Super Uniques aren’t significantly impacted by NoDrop; therefore, increasing the Player Count while farming them will only make the process take longer.
Stick to Players 1 if you’re doing area farming D2 ladder runes, which is mostly targeted at Uniques, or if you’re doing Eldritch, Shenk, or Pindle runs. However, if you’re farming bosses, Players 3 is a pretty good compromise between kill speed and NoDrop chance, so choose that player if you want to farm bosses.
How Does Magic Find Work in Diablo 2 Resurrected? What About Item Drops?
Up until now, we have been concentrating on whether or not anything at all drops; however, it is now time to discuss the quality of drops rather than the number of drops. You should remember that when you kill low-level monsters (Monster Level = mLv) or loot containers in low-level areas (Area Level = aLv), you will only be able to acquire low-level items (Item Level = iLv).
This was covered earlier in the article. This is due to the fact that the number of Treasure Classes a drop source has access to is restricted by its mLv/aLv. This is the reason why, for instance, Hell Andariel can drop a Harlequin Crest but Nightmare Andariel cannot; her mLv in Nightmare is simply not high enough to drop it. Ironically, this is also the reason why Nightmare Andariel drops a Stone of Jordan more frequently than Hell Andariel does. In Nightmare, her maximum level is high enough to drop a SoJ, but it is not high enough to drop a whole lot of other unique rings, which would otherwise dilute the drop rate.
You’re in luck if you can’t be bothered to learn the ins and outs of aLv, mLv, and iLv because, in Nightmare and Hell difficulty, which is where you’ll be doing the majority of your farming, aLv is the really important factor to keep in mind. If you can’t be bothered to learn those things, you’re in luck.
In Nightmare and Hell, the mLv of an enemy is directly determined by the aLv in which it spawns, and the iLv of a drop is determined by the mLv of the monster that dropped it (or, for containers, the iLv of a drop is directly determined by the aLv in which the container is located). The correlation between aLv, mLv, and iLv is fairly straightforward, with the exception of the following: Champions have an mLv that is two levels higher than the aLv where they spawn, and Unique monsters and their minions have an mLv that is three levels higher than the aLv where they spawn.
Magic Find
After all that has transpired, we will, at last, be able to visit Magic Find.
Only after a loot drop has been triggered, the Treasure Classes have been rolled, and a drop has been confirmed (or, more accurately, a NoDrop has been ruled out), does Magic Find have any effect. Your Magic Find increases the odds that the item that was dropped will be magical, rare, part of a set, or unique. These odds are expressed as a percentage. When a drop is confirmed, having 100% Magic Find does not ensure that an item will be magical; rather, it increases by 100% the probability that you will obtain a magical item or one of a higher quality.
When a drop is generated, the game checks to see if the drop will be unique, set, rare, magical, or normal, in that order. This is done on the assumption that the type of item chosen (during the TC roll) has a unique or set variant of the item. Despite the fact that “100% Better Chance of Getting Magic Items” will indeed double the chances that you’ll obtain a magical item, there are two things you should keep in mind: first, any specific unique item can be rare enough that their drop rate is measured in the one-in-thousands range, so while doubling this is important, it can still take hundreds of drops to get what you want, and second, there is a hidden diminishing return for unique/set/rare items when using Magic Find.
A small amount of Magic Find can go a long way, while a large amount of Magic Find… well, it doesn’t really go all that much further, at least not when compared to the amount of effort it takes to acquire so much Magic Find equipment, as well as the likely hits it will incur on your kill rate and survivability.
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How Does Magic Find Work in Diablo 2 Resurrected