1.05b Magic Find Difficulty

Strynar

Strynar

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Hi everyone,

As a classic beginner I'm really having trouble getting my MF increased, how do you go about stacking magic find and what is an ideal range? Also what areas are best for mfing in 1.05b (in general or class specific)? Maybe I'm just having bad rng but it seems a lot harder to stack than in 1.13c.

Thanks
 
I mostly just ignore magic find and just rely on RNG. That's not gonna be everyone's cup of tea but it makes for an interesting and freeing experience of just running around the world killing stuff and focusing on other things. Sometimes I would experiment with having magic find on gear though.

One critical thing to keep in mind is that MF only works on white monsters. It doesn't work on anything else. Bosses don't have unique treasure classes either so it's useless to grind bosses. The game world itself is what you grind, and most likely in higher acts. But you could grind lower acts as well if you detect that certain lower level monsters have higher chances of dropping a certain base you are looking for, primarily to get the unique or set equivalent of that base.
 
Thanks for getting back to me so quick! Man classic is so different, very foreign to not bother with grinding bosses or super uniques. Grinding the game world does sound kind of freeing in a way.

About MF only affecting white monsters, I believe I heard that in one of your Youtube videos but thanks for the reminder. I'm glad I learned that before I got too deep into my play through.
 
Yea for sure. There is something beautiful about just enjoying the present moment and going around the world killing monsters, doing quests, and finding some nice rares. Instead of worrying too much on the end game, you can enjoy the journey there as well since the end game would just be you running around Hell Difficulty killing stuff in all acts, and all caves/side dungeons.
 
After changing my outlook I have to agree, last night I had so much fun after letting go of the thought that I needed to get magic find gear. It made me look at MF in a new way, like maybe it's a tedious mechanic? I'm not sure how I feel... I mean I have had a lot of fun MFing in later patches but not worrying about it does take away a layer of tediousness. Especially when you start talking about things like quickly changing to MF gear for that last percentage of a bosses health, speaking here about later patches of course.
 
Nice :). I'm glad you are enjoying Original Classic! In the future you can always experiment and do equip MF gear and kill the white mobs and see how it turns out. That's why I also say that even though LOD 1.07 and 1.08 had "broken MF" and also some of the bosses also didn't have the treasure classes fully implemented, when you look at it from the pre-LOD perspective, I could make an argument that LOD 1.07 - 1.08 just kept the same design (or can effectively be played exactly the same in this aspect) as pre-LOD, but you just have more content. So if you played 1.07 and 1.08 without worrying about MF or grinding bosses, it would just be pre-LOD with expanded content, which is definitely not bad at all. Although one thing I don't like about 1.07/1.08 (even if it provides an interesting perspective) is that the Classic block behavior is the new LOD behavior in boths modes! So 1.07 and 1.08 are the only two D2 patches where playing Classic D2 Mode would have an Expansion Shield Block mechanic (based on dex). I like my classic "What the shield says = What you actually block" philosophy (not including wearing twitchroe or gear that further increases shield block).
 
Yeah that's true, it would be interesting to experiment with 1.05b MF in the future, once I get more familiar with the general classic experience.

That's a cool idea to play 1.07 as if it was 1.05 haha I mean why not right? Could make for an interesting play through and change things up, with some added content like you said.

Thanks for the look into the block behaviour that's kind of funny and good to know!
 
Yea they changed it in 1.07-1.08 and then reverted it in 1.09 lol. They prolly got backlash from the classic folks ;).
 
Word -- it's def more of a chill way to play (not worrying about MF). I mean when I was a kid playing D2 Classic I didn't have shit for gear and probably <50% MF, and yet I still had a blast with my WW Barbarian aka Lance Baba. Chaos runs were my favorite. And I remember trading for most of my gear which is definitely something I miss in Single Player. I also miss those amazing dual leech rings!
 
haha Yeah I find it's sometimes easy to forget that fun is the most important reason to play video games in my opinion.

I sucked at all video games as a kid. I could never get past the point in OG Half Life where that massive tentacle monster was blocking the path forward. It didn't matter though because I was just having so much fun being inside the Black Mesa facility.

Also reminds me of the modern ARPG mindset of extreme efficiency and speed. About five years ago I got really into Path of Exile for a while. Put about 700hrs into it, which is obviously nothing when talking ARPGs but still enough to get a vibe. Eventually I realized that I'm not into games that are that fast and that being efficient is not what I find fun. Sure ARPGs are all about getting stronger, which I love, but being able to do content faster is more of a side effect for me. I could care less if I cleared a Chaos run in five minutes or an hour, more importantly am I having fun? Obviously some people do find being efficient fun which is totally cool, whatever works for you.
 
Slightly off topic but i just want to add that I'll always be a big GGG fan even if POE1 isn't for me anymore. Prob my favourite developers. I was so happy when POE2 came out and was way slower, at least in the campaign. It will be interesting to see where they go with things, if they slow down the endgame a bit I could definitely see myself regularly playing the game.
 
Yea you are 100% correct on all of that @Strynar. That's how I look at it things as well. I also do have a lot of respect for the GGG devs. I actually do have a PoE1 beta account from around 2012-2013, but I never actually got into playing PoE, and I never could, not because the game isn't good, but because I don't believe in DRM and I don't buy any games that have DRM. PoE is an online only game so that is a form of DRM. If I wanted to play PoE after the servers shutdown let's say, I won't be able to. Any game that has an online only requirement and doesn't allow offline play will eventually be extinct and won't be playable. PoE is a free game though so technically this is a fair compromise, but given my stance on the whole issue and me not going to buy anything in the cash shop anyways, just means that I would rather spend my limited time on each playing a game that I could actually play for the long term. For a lot of people they won't care because they would move on to other games, but I'm still playing D2 (including original 1.05b) literally 25 years after launch, for a lot of modern games that won't be possible in another 25 years. I also still play all my stuff in a fully offline capacity with no internet connection on my machine. So things like CS 1.5 (with PODBot), Condition Zero, Hellgate London (2007), AoE 1+2, Dungeons Siege 1+2, Baldur's Gate 1+2, Terraria, Diablo 1, Warcraft 3 Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne, are just some that I'm still playing and currently have installed, with no DRM or online requirement, and I have a huge library of unplayed DRM free PC games, and an even bigger collection of Gameboy physical cartridges that have been digitally backed up (over 200). I don't even have time to play them all, so why spend additional money on games that I don't even own? I do have Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077 + Phantom Liberty, and Witcher III as well because those games were also released without DRM by Larian Studios and Cd Projekt Red, so I'm definitely not opposed to buying newer games, it just happens that a lot of modern games either have DRM, are optimized for MTX, or some other thing that completely ruins the game design, so I'm good. I also don't use Windows 11+ for similar purposes including privacy invasive telemetry and a bunch of other shenanigans.. so my gaming computer will stay on Windows 10, 7, or XP. I don't have an online connection for my gaming machines so EOL or viruses aren't a problem for me. They are just old school gaming consoles similar to a Nintendo 64, Super Nintendo, or Gameboy. And the nice thing is that all of those games and platforms will continue to be playable in another 25 years as long as the hardware works (and my physical body). Virtualization has also made major improvements so I'm not to worried about not being able to play my collection in the future. I can always just buy another used gaming laptop that runs Windows 10 or lower on eBay if I need it in the future. FYI I do use FreeBSD as my main OS and also my server runs FreeBSD, but I like gaming on Windows. Partly Nostalgia, partly I do my reverse engineering work on Windows as well for maintaining my Diablo stuff, and I also like just sitting down and playing my games without having to really worry about setting things up, or trying to maintain compatibility. Just install, double click, let's go.

If you want to read about my offline gaming setup, you can take a look at my dark island post.
 
I admire your dedication to security and to game preservation @fearedbliss. I skimmed the link you sent and have bookmarked it for future reference, it's very well written and is a fascinating topic. I can feel your passion for it. That picture of your old PC game boxes filled me with nostalgia. I actually never had a console growing up but was heavy into PC gaming. I'll never forget going to my local games store and looking at those massive old school PC game boxes, dreaming of buying them all. Typical nostalgic gamer haha. Prior to more recent years having been out of the hobby for around 15 years all of my old physical PC games were given away or sold. I'd love to still have them but what's done is done.

When I got back into gaming as an adult I didn't even know what DRM was. Due to this I bought all of my games on Steam since they seemed to have the largest selection. Now I have a nice collection that I'd rather not part with. Obviously I like GOG more than Steam as a company but there are a lot of modern games that I would like to play not available on GOG, then again there are a lot of retro games available on GOG that aren't on Steam haha. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and move over to GOG. It's also very annoying to have so many modern single player games be always online or semi always online. Obviously if it's an MMO or something it needs to be online but for a single player game to be always online? Give me a break.

Regardless I appreciate your work with Cactus immensely. Very cool that not only have you enabled so many people access to every classic Blizzard North patch but you even include so many mods that are hard to get working if you were to just download them seperately. This is some serious game preservation!

Re: GGG, it put a smile on my face while watching to your newest Cactus install video when you did a shout out to GGG. Very cool.
 
Definitely. Yea, as you saw in my dark island post, I have a screenshot there of the oldest game in my Steam account which was back in 2004, relatively soon when Steam started, I imported my Counter Strike 1.5 and Condition Zero keys. I still have those games DRM free as well (after I rebought them a few years ago when I was rebuilding my collection - original CD pre steam versions). I stopped buying games from Steam 5 years ago, so 2020 was my last year I left Steam. I still have my account but it's essentially abandoned at this point.
 
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I found the section of the Chris Wilson x David Brevik interview where they were speaking about D2 vs D2: LOD. It starts at 45:55 and lasts until around 50:00.
 
I just wanted to give one more argument for not worrying about MF in 1.05. Here are some info you might find useful:
  • In Pre-LoD patches (1.00 to 1.06), MF only works on white monsters. It does not affect drops from champions, uniques, super-uniques and Act bosses
  • In Act 4, unique and super unique monsters have a set 1 in 8 chance of dropping a rare item. So just run River of Flame and Chaos Sanctuary with your best gear and you'll find good stuff eventually.
 
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