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I sometimes see Rare (yellow) items on Merchants, and sometimes normal (white) items without any stats. This leads me to believe that there is some sort of RNG for merchants for not only the stats on the items, but the quality of the items.
Does Magic Find affect the quality of what a merchant has to offer?
Does Magic Find affect the quality of what a merchant has to offer?
Stacked to 90%, and did 80 checks with 0% and 80 checks with 90% in nightmare difficulty, the appearance of white and yellow items in the town vendors were the same (less then 0.2% difference), granted this is only 160 complete checks, and is a small sample size, but with this said, I'm saying NO, it has no effect on the results.
I don't think it does
I ran through some acts in Hell with 5 stacks of the Valor buff and MF gear on last night, which put me at around 190 MF, and didn't see any yellow items for sale. Based on the increase in yellow items I found with that much MF, I should have seen a few.
I visited vendors pretty frequently too, since I was picking up more blues/yellows than normal with that much MF, and vendor my items when my inventory gets full since I don't need crafting materials right now
Since it never has in previous versions of Diablo (and the Diablo 2 magic find mechanics were explained in quite a bit of detail), and there has been no indication that this has changed, I see no reason to think that it does. But it is going to be very difficult to prove the negative.
I don't have any exhaustive tests to offer, but based on checking their inventory several times while on various characters with differing Magic Find amounts, they are completely unaffected by MF. The town vendors generally carry only magic (blue) items, and sometimes just to insult you they will stock a few whites as well.
Sometimes, you will encounter one of them in an event; such as Tashun the Miner in the Lost Mine (he is normally in Tristram near Brother Malachi). If you complete the Lost Mine event and check his offered inventory afterwards, you'll see a rare in it (unsure if it is always there or limited to only one yellow). There is also a similar merchant NPC Larra in the Deserted Cellar dungeon in Act 2 (the little girl who has hidden from the monsters on her mother's advice).
When you mentioned having seen rares on in-town merchants, did you by any chance complete Lost Mine and then visit the town in that session? Tashun is faster than he looks, he will get back to his old place faster than you can teleport there - I haven't tested this, but he may be offering the same goods to you that are on sale after the Lost Mine completion.
