This week's article of The Scrying Pool looks at a hot topic in GW2: Magic Find.

While the current setup is bad for MF, it did have one thing going for it in that players were actively striving for and acquiring it. If it is something that is given freely to all players, whether through all armor or by character level, then the value of having an MF stat is lost. At that point it would probably be easier just to remove MF from all gear and adjust drop rates accordingly.

When Colin says “slowly build” it makes me think of progression. Some of you might be thinking that progression equals grinding, which is bad. I will agree that grinding kind of sucks, but only in the cases where you need to be at the max. If this progression only has MF, it wouldn’t really be a grind. Like I said before, MF is one of those magical things that can be seen as both necessary and unnecessary. Those that think it is necessary probably will see it as a grind, but those that don’t can essentially say screw it and never touch it. I’ve done pretty much the same thing with Ascended gear (having not a single piece on any character that is ascended rarity) and that is something that probably is actually necessary.

Then there are the players who love grinding and progressions. GW2 has a distinct lack of alternate progression, mostly due, in my opinion, to a major problem of progressions in rewarding players for progressing without forcing players into the progression. Having MF the reward of a progression would give that grind or progression to the players that love it while MF’s lack of necessity wouldn’t force players into the progression.

I don’t think this is enough though. I still think there would be that sense of “I must do this in order to gain more MF.” So what I would want to do is split up MF into a bunch of smaller parts. Instead of having that one progression that increases magic find everywhere in the game, there would be multiple progressions that target individual areas.

There are two ways this could be tackled. The first is through an expanded Slayer achievement system and the other is through dungeon progression.

The first way is pretty simple. You kill stuff. The more of a single type of mob that you kill, the higher your MF would be with that single mob. For example, if you only ever play in Orr you would have your Zhaitan’s Bane track maxed pretty quickly and getting tons of MF while killing the undead. Now if you go to kill Flame Legion scum, you won’t have the same super high MF with them (though you can progress in that track if you want).

The second way is similar to the first. As you run dungeons and work through the progression for that dungeon you would get higher MF while in that specific dungeon. This setup could even be expanded for killing the same enemies of a dungeon out in the open world. If you are maxed out in Twilight Arbor, you would still have a high MF when fighting the Nightmare Court out in the open world. The only setback to this system is that there are a lot more enemy types than there are similar dungeons, which means that some open world mob types would have no current method of increasing their specific MF line.

The idea behind both of these setups is to play the way you want to play and be rewarded for it, a sentiment very similar to ArenaNet’s global design. If you only want to run CoF, you can build your MF through only running CoF. You don’t ever have to run a different dungeon or go do quests out in the open world to build it for CoF.

Having a multiple progression setup for magic find  would require that the progressions not be too long. While some players might only want one or two, there are some who would undoubtedly want them all. While having a long build toward one or two progressions would work, a long build toward multiple paths would definitely fall into a grind.

Matt “Mattsta” Adams can be found on the Blackgate server, probably leveling one of his many alts.

I am curious how many people read the Living Story blog posts about the backstory of the characters. They are really interesting to read, but being on the Guild Wars 2 site and not in game I feel that most players probably miss them. On the other hand, the simplest way for them to be implemented into the game would be a journal that players click on to read which would probably be missed by even more players than a blog post on the official site.

If you have a question for me, comment below or tweet it to @MattstaNinja and your question might just find its way into a future Scrying Pool.