Magic Find, a concept that’s been around since the early days of Diablo II, and since Path of Exile has built on that legacy of excellent action RPG fun that Blizzard created, it makes sense that many aspects and ideas from Diablo have made the leap over the POE. One of those all-important concepts is Magic Find.
Magic Find, is simply the act of increasing both the quantity and rarity that is added to item rolls when they drop. The effect is obvious and immediate. Because every item in the game is affected by Quantity rolls, any substantial additions in this area will increase the amount of loot that drops. Stacking increased Rarity on top of that increases the odds of Rare and Unique item drops, buffing the chance that a POE player can farm that ultra-powerful item that will sell for huge amounts of currency in-game.
It’s all really basic, all you really need to do to make a Magic Find (MF) build in Path of Exile is to stack four stats on your character:
- Item Quantity
- Item Rarity
- Movement Speed
- Attack/Cast Speed
The general idea is to simply zip around the map and kill all of the mob packs as quickly as possible. Because of the “squishy” nature of your builds when running MF characters, some POE players choose to skip map bosses.
If you need help understanding the mapping process, we’ve created a mapping guide for Synthesis League. If you’re running an MF character, it’s a great way to farm high-end T16 Maps, we’ve got a guide on that aspect of play too.
There’s a new players guide to POE that lays out the basics of playing this ARPG. If you want a POE 3.6 starter build, that’s here too. We’ve also got a guide about the basics of Synthesis League and the Memory Nexus if you want that. For you end-game farmers, we’ve even got a guide to mapping in Synthesis. If you’re leveling a character for the first time and need some help optimizing your item loadout, we got that covered as well. And if you need a refresher on Betrayal League content, we’ve got you.
Magic Find Builds
The process of crafting a magic find build in POE does have huge upside potential, but does come with some drawbacks. For one thing, the gear choices often mean that you sacrifice damage and health in order to gain as much of a combination of movement and attack speed, quantity and rarity as possible. This often leads to limited class and Ascendancy choices as well, as players often opt for going with very defensive characters in order to stay alive while farming.
Demi’s Faster Lemon (Classic MF Pathfinder)
This highly flexible POE build template allows players to choose pretty much any attack skill in the game that works with Bows and slot it into the gear and Ascendancy choices in the guide and go. With high-end gear, you can easily get more than 150% increased Quantity on this build. And since the items are always in-demand, selling the gear after you’re done will be pretty easy.
The build is optimized for SoftCore play, as it would die too easily on HC past about T8 or so Maps. Other than that, there’s enough Life, Evasion and DPS to deal with most map farming runs.
And since we’re repping Demi, I’ll throw in a great video they did talking through the basics of theorycrafting and gearing for Magic Find in Path of Exile.
3.6 MF Windripper by Mai-Cedere
Another Ranger-based build, with many of the same gear choices as Demi’s guide, but it’s built specifically around Tornado Shot. This means a higher potential for DPS that could help speed up mapping a bit. The high-end gear for this build might be rather expensive, but seriously increases both the amount of Rarity and Quantity and over all DPS. Those expensive items are exclusive to Standard though.
We’ve also got a video of this build in action too.
3.6 Vaal Spark MF Pathfinder
The next build we have is a super strong build that’s getting both great clear speed and decent buffs to Rarity and Quantity. This build features INSANE clear speed and it’s cheap to start out with, you can even make it your league starter. The usage of Vaal version of this already ultra-powerful skill, Arc, allows for some really great DPS. And with the buffs to spellcasting in 3.6, Arc is still strong and will remain so.
This build is also very flexible, allowing for both Lowlife and normal variants to be run with it and still retain decent Magic Find potential with around 150% Quantity and nearly 200% Rarity on the top end. And of course, we’ve got a video of it in action.
3.6 Kinetic Blast Deadeye MF
The final build is another Ranger variant, with very similar strengths to the other builds on the list. It’s the cheapest build that can run decent MF, even farming on cheap 4-link gear, this makes it an amazing league starter choice. You can easily farm an Exalted Orb an hour with this fast-moving beast.
Kinetic Blast is actually pretty tanky if you sacrifice some of the Quantity to transition this into an early league map farmer in Path of Exile 3.6. And with this being a spellcaster build, it’s pretty good due to the buffs this leauge.
Notes about Magic Find:
- Maps, Divination Cards and Currency items are only affected by Quantity Rolls.
- Semi-strict or even Strict loot filters will help reduce the on-screen clutter.
