Did you know that Magic Find is arguably the most popular attribute in Diablo game? Did you know that Magic Find is still present in Diablo 4 even after it’s fully released? Are you interested in learning how this innovative and interesting property became completely useless in Diablo 3 and was eventually removed entirely in Diablo 4?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then hang on. This guide outlines the rise and fall of Magic Find during the evolution of Diablo game.

How Does Magic Find Work?

Magic Find was first introduced in 2000 with the release of Diablo 2, and it remains one of the most important statistics for players, especially after the launch of Diablo 2: Resurrected.

Magic Find is the stat that everyone wants: it increases the drop rate of Magic, Rare, Unique and Set items by a percentage of the original drop rate. So if your character has 50% Magic Find, and a mob or boss has a 1% chance of dropping a Magic item, you actually have a 1.5% chance of getting that item.

Magic Find In Diablo 2

In Diablo 2, Magic Find can be obtained not only through equipment but also through runes. It can be used to enhance your gear, gems, can be embedded into items, as well as charms of different sizes, and can be added to your inventory to add stats to your character.

In an interesting twist, you need to give up Magic Find for different character powers: inventory space for Charms, and actual combat stats for Runes, Gems and Items.

Part of Diablo 2’s endgame is balancing the amount of Magic Find you have while maintaining a strong enough character to kill monsters and bosses effectively. Best of all, Magic Find has no upper limit. The roll limits the amount of Magic Find you have only on the item, with a theoretical maximum of just over 1,100%.

As you might imagine, finding more and more Magic Find was, and still is, a big part of Diablo 2. Because it’s really fun to have a stat that actually changes the drop rate in your favor.

The developers have further improved this system by adding new Magic Find sources in the expansion Lord of Destruction.

It’s clear that Magic Find, combined with Rune and Runeword systems, has contributed greatly to Diablo 2’s playability and success so far. As a result, there are still many players playing Diablo 2: Resurrected, especially with the game being updated semi-regularly.

Magic Find In Diablo 3

With Diablo 3, the developers took a more conservative approach. But they seem to view balancing the game around Magic Find as more of a hurdle.

Their reasoning is that if players can increase the drop rate so much, then the base drop rate without any Magic Find will be very low, similar to Diablo 2.

We all know where these decisions lead: each Rift Guardian drops a ton of Legendary and Set items, but 99.9% of the loot is worthless and players have a full set of gear after half a day of playing.

Overall, Diablo is becoming a game for casual players.

When looking through several pieces of loot I’ve picked up on exits in D2 in the past, I found that the game gives you so many Legendary and Set items that checking them all one by one feels cumbersome and a waste of time.

This has even forced developers to introduce new rare items, such as Ancient and Primal Ancient Legendaries, that have better or higher rolling stats than the original items.

While I believe Reaper of Souls expansion and subsequent released seasons did improve the overall quality of the base game, it certainly pushed the series further toward casual players and away from the original two games.

The changes to Magic Find are just part of the bigger picture. Magic Find in the original Diablo 3 is very similar to the effect in Diablo 2. However, after many changes, its importance slowly but steadily waned.

Originally, Magic Find percentage was a stat that could be rolled randomly on items, with a hard cap of 300% on Magic Find coming from gear. This hard cap immediately eliminates the exciting balance between Magic Find and character abilities we discussed in Diablo 2.

With the introduction of the original Paragon system, you’ll gain 3% of Magic Find per Paragon level. Unfortunately, this and the vast majority of Magic Find you could get from gear were removed with Reaper of Souls expansion, save for a few special perks on legendary items that are considered largely useless today.

Also, the expansion also imposes a heavy penalty on your existing Magic Find for increasing the drop chance of Rare and Legendary items: only 20% of Magic Find is added to the drop chance of Rare items. For Legendary and Set items, this number is even only 5%.

This means that a hard cap of 300% Magic Find will increase your Rare item drop rate by 60%, while Legendary item drop rates will only increase by 15%. These numbers are obviously a far cry from Diablo 2’s numbers. This makes the incentive to equip the few remaining items with this property essentially non-existent.

In fact, players don’t need to balance their character’s power with the amount of Magic Find they carry. This resulted in Diablo 3 having to introduce several difficulty levels: 16 Torment levels and several Greater Rift levels.

But all levels have increasing chances of dropping more and better loot. This gives players access to hundreds of different game modes with varying difficulties, rather than just a few difficulty levels, and makes it harder for those who choose to carry more Magic Find by making them give up character powers.

Magic Find In Diablo 4

As for Diablo 4, not many players know that Magic Find did exist in the game for a short period. Because its impact is even smaller than Diablo 3.

You can’t even get it by installing Magic Find on your gear or through Paragon Board.

The only appearance of Magic Find in Diablo 4 is as an affix on Nightmare Dungeon Sigils.

Nightmare Dungeon is an endgame activity in which players open dungeons using Sigils, who determine the dungeon’s difficulty and certain attributes. These attributes are called affixes, one of which is Magic Find.

No one knows exactly what this affix does, other than a brief description of “You find more items from enemies.” The exact percentage of this bonus and the items it affects were never actually revealed. But some players have reported significant increases in loot, especially when running Nightmare Dungeon with this affix.

Despite this, players have found a way to abuse Magic Find affix by using a trick to keep resetting the same Nightmare Dungeon repeatedly, thus keeping the bonus permanently active.

You may have noticed that I used the past tense when talking about Magic Find in Diablo 4. Because the developer’s response to this abuse was to remove Magic Find affix from any newly dropped Nightmare Sigils. They also later fixed a bug that allowed players to endlessly reset Nightmare Dungeon with the same affix.

So today, despite probably spamming the same Nightmare Dungeon endlessly, Magic Find simply doesn’t exist in the game. All we can do is wonder if it will be added again.

This is the story of the rise and fall of Magic Find in Diablo: from the core game mechanics to the barely noticeable affixes that were removed from the game to prevent misuse. Which implementation of Magic Find is your favorite? See you next time!