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I have some equipment that I can swap in as-needed to boost magic find instead of more useful mods. Normally I end up not using the MF pieces much, as I'd rather focus on killing mobs instead. However, there are Resplendent Chests in the game which give several magic items when opened - when does the game decide what to give me, is it

  • when the level is generated
  • upon entering the room with the chest
  • on opening it

Would carrying around +MF gear and swapping to it before opening the chest make a difference in the quality of its drops?

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As of the 1.03 patch, Magic Find only affects the drops when a monster dies. It has no effect on chests, barrels, or other containers.

I don't yet have enough MF gear to test it properly, but information is nevertheless from personal experience, from the existence of the Treasure shrine, and from Blizzard comments such as the one quoted in this Q&A session, in which they acknowledge that switching weapons right before a boss dies will make its dropped loot better, which is why there's no fast weapon-switch concept like there was in Diablo II.

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  • +1 for the useful link, makes it very likely to have that mechanice for D3. Quoting here, but can you add to the comment for reference? Guest-519: is there a way to switch weapons quickly on the run? (As we did with Diablo 2 by pressing "W") ? JayWilson: To Guest-519 No. In polling players this seemed to primarily be used to hot swap to high magic find weapons right before a boss died, which didn't seem like great gameplay to encourage. – Alok May 18 '12 at 1:35
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It is to early to say for sure but if it works like Diablo 2 then it is your magic find when opening it that count towards what loot drops, so equipping a magic find set before opening would increase your chances of better loot.

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    This would also jive with it from a technical perspective (if it uses a similar or the same system as loot drops for mobs, it saves Blizz a lot of effort) – Nevir May 17 '12 at 0:23
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From an extensive knowledge of Diablo, and development, I would assume that the magic find is not applied until the chest opens.

I would say this because the game would have to take a snapshot of your magic find every time a chest was "within range" whenever you moved to new areas, and save this value until a specified time (probably for the length of the entire game) which seems very unlikely. They obviously couldn't preload the items, because you could sniff out what items are in what chest by looking your computers RAM.

It is much more likely that they generate the type of chest when it gets generated, and then makes a separate call to the server to ask what items were generated based on the current state of your character.

What I wrote above is just a guess, but I would be surprised if any sort of values that are tied to item drops are cached server side (if they cache it on the client, it is possible to falsify on server calls).

TLDR:

The only time your magic find matters is when you OPEN the chest or kill a monster.

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    +1 for good points; esp. about having to cache indefinitely & not able to preload on clients – Alok May 18 '12 at 1:31
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    As of 1.03 patch, Magic Find does not affect chests at all. – bwarner Jun 19 '12 at 15:52
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The magic find (MF) gear swap was working on chests before patch 1.03 but now it does not work anymore.

Magic Find will no longer be considered when looting objects in the environment such as chests, barrels, vases, pots, and corpses

extracted from Diablo 3 patch 1.03 changelog - link

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