Ladder Starter Magic Find Guide | Diablo 2 Resurrected Patch 2.6

Other than levelling up your character and grinding, magic finding is the core purpose of Diablo 2's endgame. By understanding the game's drop mechanics and your options to boost drop chances, you can make MFing a more exciting and rewarding experience. This guide covers the basic unique and set item farming strategies.

Choosing an MFing Build:

There are three criterias that should be met when you choose a build for the purpose of magic finding. These are:

• Being able to move quickly
• Being able to kill Bosses fast
• Being able to wear Magic Find items without serious deteriorations in performance

The one class that ticks all these boxes is Sorceress, as Sorcs have the fastest movement ability due to the Teleport skill, can quickly halve Boss life by using Static Field, and can deliver a decent amount of Cold, Fire or Lightning damage even in complete magic find gear. In fact, Sorceresses are the only characters that are able to have 1000% magic find and still farm Bosses with great speed.

However if your preferred character isn't a Sorc, make sure to have Naj's Puzzler as your switch weapon, or wear an Enigma runeword armor to gain the teleport skill. As Naj's Puzzler has 69 teleport charges, it allows any build to use the teleport skill by wearing this fairly cheap weapon (although each recharging/repair will cost a decent sum of gold).

Magic Find Mechanics

Having increased Magic Find % on your gear is a key element of MFing efficiently, but to make an educated decision on your chosen equipment you should be familiar with the mechanics of MFing. Increased MF linearly improves your chance of finding Magic quality items, but for Rares, Sets and Uniques it has diminishing returns, as can be seen on this graph. Here are a few numbers as examples:

• 100% Magic Find: +100% magic items, +85% rare items, +83% set items, +71% unique items
• 200% Magic Find: +200% magic items, +150% rare items, +142% set items, +111% unique items
• 500% Magic Find: +500% magic items, +272% rare items, +250% set items, +166% unique items
• 1000% Magic Find: +1000% magic items, +375% rare items, +333% set items, +200% unique items

To see the complete magic find table, check out this link.

In order to determine how much magic find % your character should optimally have, the increased chances of finding your preferred items should be in balance with movement and kill speed.

Ladder Starter MF Gear

The easiest and quickest way to boost your Magic Find % early on in a new ladder season is by socketing Perfect Topazes in your helm and shield. Each gem will provide a +24% MF chance to your character.

Since item drop is determined at the moment of the Kill, you can wear items with high magic find % as your secondary weapon and shield, and switch to them right before you kill an enemy. A shield with 4 perfect topaz sockets is a great candidate for a switch item.

Another easily accessible magic find item is a Wealth runeword body armor, granting you +100% MF.

Other relatively cheap and easily accessible magic find items are:
Gheed's Fortune Grand Charm (+20-40% MF)

Chance Guards Gloves (25-40% MF)

Gull Dagger (100% MF)

Blade of Alibaba (1% MF per level)

Nagelring (25-30% MF)

Goldwrap Belt (30% MF)

Some of the more costly, but great magic find items are:

Harlequin Crest Shako helm (50% MF)

War Traveler boots (30-50% MF)

Skullder&'s Ire Armor (1.25% MF per level)

Tal Rasha's Armor (88% MF)

Magic Small Charms of Good Luck (5-7% MF each)

Ladder Starter FCR Gear:

Faster cast rate is a key element of your farming efficiency. Sorceresses have the lowest casting frame breakpoints, without any FCR% on their gear Sorcs are able to cast a teleport once every 13 frames. One second consists of 25 frames in the game, so the base teleport speed is about two teleports casted for every second. There are two breakpoints that you should aim for, 63% FCR on a sorceress allows you to teleport once every 9 frames and 105% allows for 8 frames. There is one more breakpoint at 200% fcr and 7 frames, but reaching this breakpoint requires very specific items which do not have good magic finding potential.

An easy to obtain FCR weapon and shield is the Spirit Runeword, which grants 25-35% FCR in each of the two item slots, and allows you to easily reach the 63% breakpoint. To reach the 105% breakpoint, your best option is wearing an Arachnid Mesh belt and a Magefist or Trang Oul’s gloves. You can also change your Spirit weapon to a Wizardspike or a Suicide branch, both of which grants you 50% faster cast rate. Optionally, you can also easily buy 10% faster cast rate magic rings from Vendors, or gamble rings to get 10% fcr ones with additional useful stats.

Farming the right monsters

When deciding which monster to farm, the determining factors should be drop rates of the seeked items, distance from waypoint and ease of killing. Act Bosses have by far the highest unique and set item drop rates in general, with later Act Bosses being capable of dropping higher tier unique items.

The two most commonly farmed bosses are Mephisto and Andariel. Both of them have excellent drop-rates of highly seeked unique items, with Mephisto being somewhat easier to get to than Andariel.

Although Diablo and Baal are capable of dropping higher tier uniques, spawning them takes several minutes, so farming them is not as time-effective as some other monster choices.

If you aim to find high-tier uniques that can't be dropped by Andy/Meph, your best bet is farming Pindleskin, or possibly Nihlathak.

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