I'm sort of hitting a wall. Got 20m to spend but I can't even find any upgrades for my equip at 10m or less. I can easily clear act 1, act 2 is a bit challenging.

what class are you and link to gear?

I may just be running good, but I recently got my gear up to 260 base MF (w/enchantress) for A1 runs, and after playing a long time on multiple characters I had found one legendary and no sets. But with 5 stacks that put me at 335 MF, I've found 3 set items and 4 or 5 legendaries over the past week and a half or so. (granted they mostly all suck but whatev) It seemed to me that once I got over 300 MF, that stuff started dropping for me.

though there isn't hard data on this, it is believed that trash has approx the same chance of set/legendaries as champ packs, or at least the rare:legendary ratio is much larger for champ packs than trash.
Therefore, if you are running a build that skips trash and hunts champs you will find far less legendaries than a build that kills all trash (and in such a way that you can see it's loot - a ww barb kills trash but kills it by running past it and rarely goes back to look at what's dropped.)
Mostly I think it's just lolvariance though.

Until a legendary buff it's kind of hard to care anyway

Has there been talk of increasing the drop rate also?

I don't think so... I suspect it's going to be an AH thing for most of us

heh, I got my base MF up to 150 and promptly found my first set item

It sucked, ldo, mf sucks all you get are crappy legendary/set items

would we be able to get to the login screen if there was a patch for d3?

also euro and asia servers are up. did you guys get patched?

EU is being patched tomorrow morning CET

Really what is up with Blizzards lack of communication. I believe there has been 1 blue post in the last week.

For some reason I was starting the game at Warrior's Rest (small crypt in festering woods) and decided to just farm that skeleton with 250% mf and see how long it takes. On average it took 2 minutes for 3 runs, so 90 (act 1) kills in an hour which is a pretty good rate for completely safe and mindless farming.

Going to the vendor reset the waypoint and I started in town again, so of course I googled Warrior's Rest waypoint and found a forum where people were botting this area since early June. The interesting part is that the people there already had the non guaranteed rare thing figured too, and here's some of the data I found after skimming the thread.

Data collection:

Population 1: Rares that drop from boss kills with 0% mf and 0 NV stacks

Population 2: Rares that drop from boss kills with 234% mf and 0 NV stacks

Sample 1:

200 runs of Warrior's Rest Inferno with 0% mf and 0 NV stacks while only picking up drops that came specifically from the boss kill Data:

Rares found = 71

4 affix rares found = 41

5 affix rares found = 26

6 affix rares found = 4

Sample 2:

200 runs of Warrior's Rest Inferno with 234% mf and 0 NV stacks while only picking up drops that came specifically from the boss kill Data:

Rares found = 214

4 affix rares found = 131

5 affix rares found = 68

6 affix rares found = 15

From the data above, MF didn't seem to impact affixes, but it's only a 200 sample size.

Wasn't it that Solsek found that mf didn't affect affixes on the guaranteed drop but did the others? And that the guaranteed drops don't come until you have 5 valor?

Well he thought that guaranteed drops weren't affected by MF, but it seems that MF doesn't affect affixes either on non-guaranteed drops if you use the sample above. There's no difference in % between 234% mf and 0% mf, but of course the sample is really small. This is contrary to what Blizzard has said, but perhaps the % was overblown.

Whoever is running these bots has gazillions of data points on non guaranteed drops. A pretty concrete answer on MF and guaranteed/nonguaranteed rares should be easy to find if they're logging those things.

I'm 100% certain the botters methology or Blizzards cleverness can explain why it appears that MF does not affect the boss drops.

First, and most likely is that Blizzard themselves have said that they want people killing champs, not farming bosses. This this method of farming may be altered in such a way that more items can drop with MF, but they are treated as of the person has no MF when determining the number of affixes.

Second, and a close candidate is that items below ilvl 52 may drop and those items may never have 5 or more affixes.

Third, were these botters using the item code glitch to accurately determine the number of affixes?

There are a few more reasons as to why their data may appear to show that MF is useless, but I can assure you, if you farmed 200 non-guaranteed rares with 300 MF and 200 non-guaranteed rares with 0 MF, you will see a large difference in the distribution of affixes. This is true if you farm from champ packs and not bosses.

What I suspect is going on is bosses are only fully affected by MF once you get 5 stacks. That would be the next step for them to do in their experiment. Since its safe to assume the last 2 items dropped are the guaranteed ones, they can collect a lot of non-guaranteed rares from that boss with 230 MF and compare results.

I personally think its a bad idea to only consider boss drops since Blizzard may have done something really screwy with their drop tables and limitations.

This is solsek on a friends account.

I can do more testing of this theory later. Another thing is that this boss may have a weird loot table. If you farmed siegebreaker 200 times with 234 MF and no stacks, I doubt you would get 214 rares.

Siegebreaker often drops only the 2 guaranteed rares for me about 50% of the time when I kill him with 5 stacks and 319 MF. The 71 rares with 0 MF and no stacks in 200 runs is insane as well. Try it on other bosses to see if you get that same percentage of drops. I won't be able to get on a computer until Friday.

This is good data though. It just supports the idea of farming champs fast without a heavy focus on the boss.

Think Im finally done with this game until Blizz add some kind of endgame content. Now that I've had a sick roll (crafted a 90m chest) there is nothing left to do but sell the remaining crafts in my stash.

Witch doctor, tanking/LOH/CC type build
Here's my gear:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2187900/Diablo/Mystats.jpg

Yup, I was just posting this data as some additional information rather than refuting your theory, cause you definitely know your stuff more than I do.

By "bosses", are you including all uniques or just uniques with a quest purpose such as this one? I was under the impression "bosses" meant more like Warden , Butcher, etc.

It would be strange for uniques to drop differently from champion packs, as they aren't much easier, but it could make sense since they are technically different and it'd be easy to add in different drop rules just to throw a curveball at farmers.

I considered bosses as warden/butcher/siegebreaker/azmodan/cydaea etc...is the boss these guys were farming a unique? That might explain it all right there. They have changed the unique drop tables quite a bit since release. The dropped good stuff originally, then dropped nothing, then dropped random rares/blues.

solsekkkkkkkkkkk rate my MF items I posted earlier

Kirby, your the helmet and boots are very good MF pieces. They lack a little bit of offensive stats but make up for it with very good defensive stats and high MF. As far as prices go, I don't know...I can look it up and give a good estimate if that's what you wanted. The pants are not that great though. 150+ vitality is almost a requirement for the pants to have any decent value. Good pieces of gear though. The 12% MS on the boots makes that probably the best out of the 3, but the 20% MF + socket on the helmet with good stats is also very good.

yeah bought the helm 60$ and boots 70

pants 10$

(when gold was worth $ more than currently -.-)

i thought helm was a huge steal at 60$. Like barbs dont get much strength on helms anyway. Kind of a wasted stat or two but othertwise it would be insta 250$ i suppose

Yep he's a unique, I don't know if you consider him a boss. He's one of the skeletons from Festering Woods in the two crypts.

Got my computer 2 days early so I got to test out my new equipment (+50% MF). So my base is now 234 compared to 180 when I originally did the MF testing. I can tell there is a slight increase in 6 affix rares and 5 affix rares and a slight decrease in 4 affix rares. The guaranteed rares still remains the same....most of them 4 affix. So that unique boss data is not really that useful.