Magic Find?

[toruvinn]

Hey, pretty new to the game with a bunch of questions.

I see there is magic quality/quantity stats, but they are extremely rare and have incredibly low percentages anyway (like, 1.5% on a 60lvl item). Given it's pretty extreme grind to find anything relevant (lvl60 still wearing lvl25 gear, most of it in fact is <40), I was wondering if there's a way to increase the drop chance. I hope the answer isn't "go grind forge forever because it's the only place where you can stack more magic quantity/quality". :-/

Also, since the game is really lacking in explanation of, well, just about anything (how do all those stats work, what do they really influence?), is there some good guide explaining all those basics somewhere?

Also, is there any benefit to going further and further in the "normal" expedition? All the levels are the same, I did not notice higher XP gains or anything like that, so how does going to the next floor differ from just restarting the whole thing (apart from being a bit faster, potentially)?

Thanks.

[Ashmore[The Slormancer]]

Hi,
Magic Find is indeed pretty rare. But If you are still using Level 25 gear at Level 60 then I believe you haven't taken advantage of the Blacksmith yet. You have to craft relevant pieces in The Slormancer, especially when you just get to Level 60.

You can hover over your stats in your Inventory to get all the information you need about what stats do. I believe it should at least cover the basics.

And finally, there is one single reason to keep going in Battlefield Expeditions: You gain a "Breach Bonus Reward" stack (a buff you can hover over), increasing Slorm and Goldus Rewards.

Cheers!

[toruvinn]

Originally posted by AshmoreThe Slormancer:

(...)

Thank you, I didn't really expect an answer from anyone from the team. It's really nice to see you folks active on the forums. Looking at other games too, this makes the community really happy usually. :-)

Anyway, thank you for the info. Yes, I frankly haven't played around with the blacksmith too much yet, simply because there's just... a lot of things there and some of them I don't exactly understand yet, but that's - again - a matter of me digging into some sort of source that explains connection between all the stats.

Regarding stats themselves, some of them aren't very clear. For instance, skill damage is explained using... skill damage. I am assuming the name is self-explanatory (i.e. damage that is the base damage for my skills, so primary/secondary slot, space, and... probably not the ancestral skills, hm).
But then we have things like elemental damage, which is apparently separate, and how - or rather where - does it come into that equation, I'm not sure. I guess I deal both skill and elemental damage using, say, primary skill. But then how does elemental/armour penetration work? The first only for elemental damage, the latter only for skill (raw+reaper) damage?
Also, raw I suppose is just "physical"?
Isn't DoT also elemental or something? Does it use armour penetration, elemental penetration, or anything like that? For instance, what I've learned that DoTs actually seem to crit in this game (which I think is rare otherwise), or perhaps those weren't DoTs?

There is a whole bunch of things which are mentioned here and there (Time-Stop? How do I even apply this effect?), but I simply don't understand what they do yet. Also, arrow fork and pierce, can this happen at the same time? Rebound is more clear, because it happens when projectiles hit a solid obstacle (a wall), but when they hit an enemy, there is a bunch of effects that can happen - are they mutually exclusive, or not?

Anyway, that's a lot of questions and I don't really expect anyone to answer them (because I have a thousand more ready, trust me ;-)), but I wanted to show why I'm looking for a more in-depth guide or wiki (actually, I've found a wiki yesterday, need to dig in, hopefully it's up to date.... ;-)).
The on-hover tooltips are helpful, but there's only so much space you can use to explain complex mechanics there, so... Yeah.

EDIT: Oh, please never change the way the huntress looks when she's delighted. It makes me... delighted. :-D

[Peredur]

Originally posted by toruvinn:

Regarding stats themselves, some of them aren't very clear. For instance, skill damage is explained using... skill damage. I am assuming the name is self-explanatory

Unfortunately, all names are not self-explanatory.
Skill damage should be understood as physical damage. (skills use either skill damage, elemental damage or both)
And Elemental damage should be understood as magical damage. (elemental damage is not related to elements)
And Attack speed should be understood as cooldown reduction.
Someday, we will finally get them to change those names.


Most info are already in game. You just need to know where to look.

First source of information is the character sheet: you get three pages covering all possible stats and you can have a description of what the stat do in a popup while you hover the stat.

Second source of info is the description and tags of a skill (class or ancestral) or modifier.
There is especially the info of the damage it does depending on it's mastery level.
For example, Void Arrow deals (85% + 3% per mastery level) Skill damage and (85% + 3% per mastery level) Elemental damage, meaning if you have 1000 Skill damage and 200 Elemental damage and the skill is at first Mastery level, it will do 850 (85% or your Skill damage) + 170 (85% of your Elemental damage) = 1020 damage (yeah, the first mastery level is included in the base damage so it would be more accurate displayed as 82% + 3%).

Last source is the popup that can appear after a couple of seconds not moving the mouse while displaying the description of a skill or modifier.

Most often when an info seem missing, it's because where to look for it is not obvious.
With the mage, the Temporal Judgment modifier of the skill Chrono-Puncture allows to trigger Temporal Sentence on every Traumatized enemy. Traumatize is a debuff effect that does nothing but is placed by default by Chrono-Puncture (the description of the base skill tells it place a stack but doesn't explain what it does because it does nothing - it would be better if it told it does nothing). Temporal Sentence is another previous modifier on Chrono-Puncture.
Also, on the mage, the clones are totem but it is only stated as so in a tag in the modifier allowing to place clones.

There are a few cases where the info is missing but they are rare enough.