I wanted to find out exactly how +Gold Find and +Magic Find work. Their tooltips say that they increase the amount of gold or magic items you will find by a certain percent. If you have 100% +Gold Find does that mean that gold is twice as likely to drop from something or are you going to find twice as much gold per period of time? Is there even a difference? Is there anything else we need to know hiding between the lines?
To answer the question I put together two sets of gear, one with 0% +Gold Find and the other with exactly 120% +Gold Find. This seemed like a large enough gap and I had the stuff sitting around anyways. I ran gold farming runs for about 20 minutes, during Patch 13, with each set of gear and recorded how much gold I found. The results for were as follows (bottom rows are total/overall):
+0% Gold Find
Time | Gold Found | GPM | GPH |
7:05 | 1152 | 163 | 9,780 |
9:45 | 1726 | 177 | 10,620 |
6:40 | 999 | 150 | 9,000 |
23:30 | 3877 | 165 | 9,900 |
+120% Gold Find
Time | Gold Found | GPM | GPH |
10:40 | 3537 | 332 | 19,920 |
7:20 | 2836 | 387 | 23,220 |
6:10 | 1951 | 316 | 18,960 |
24:10 | 8324 | 344 | 20,640 |
The difference between the two is right around 110%. So with 120% +Gold Find I increased my rate of gold per minute by 110%. Why not 120%? I probably didn’t run enough tests for it to even off, as you can see from run to run the rate I found gold fluctuated a lot. It might be slightly slower to farm gold with high +Gold Find due to the possibility that gold may drop more often, leaving you more places to run to and loot stuff off the ground.
Twenty thousand gold an hour is nothing to scoff at in the beta, and this doesn’t include the full inventory of magic items I salvaged and sold the materials from. We’ll take a look at the best +Gold Find sets next week but preliminary observations suggest that we can stack as much as +300% to +400% gold find and magic find at level 60.
Important: Many of the strategies and tips I share here were originally inspired by the people at the Diablo 3 Gold Secrets Forum. If you're serious about making the big bucks in Diablo 3, or just being the best players, you need to signup ASAP.
This is very encouraging. It shows that there’s a direct correlation between GF and actual gold found. MF will be harder to test though, larger sample size needed.