There was an argument going on over at the Blizzard Diablo 3 forums where Athene called out Blizzard on false advertisement with regards to Magic Find. His complaint was that there was no empirical evidence that clearly demonstrates what Magic Find does. He compared the experience of playing his Wizard vs his Demon Hunter. His Demon Hunter is around Paragon level 90 while his Wizard is more or less brand new. Quite quickly, his Wizard found good legendaries whereas his Demon Hunter would take numerous runs before finding even something remotely worthwhile (if at all any).
So the question at the heart of this controversy is really all about the definition of Magic Find. There was an excellent post on a website where players took surveys using gear, etc. and large samples of monsters to demonstrate the probability and workings of Magic Find. The post is quite in depth, using graphs, etc. to expatiate on the premise of how Magic Find works.
However, Athene’s issue is that Magic Find is more or less useless as a statistic and misleading. For myself, I think Magic Find by definition is quite straight forward: it simply is how much magical items that you can find on kills. That’s all it really is. There is some correlation to the quality of gear in the way items are rolled. The post explaining how Magic Find works discusses the basic workings of how items are rolled. In that sense, the gear that you get can get better with higher Magic Find values.
Now, here’s where the real controversy lies. The problem is that while the gear in general can improve in quality, the exact stats you want on an item more than likely will not show up as you’d like. Magic Find’s only guarantees are that the higher the value, the great the chance of rolling on the highest items until you get a base item. Magic Find does not guarantee the item you desperately need.
Magic Find (and Diablo for the most part) is essentially a slot machine. There are two pulls in this; one when you kill a mob and one when you identify the item. The only way to get the items you truly want is just plain numbers and statistics; in other words, you must use numbers and statistics to your advantage, meaning maximizing your Magic Find and continuing to grind away. When you see top items on the Auction House, that’s merely the result of the collective players in Diablo killing tons of creatures and demonstrating their efforts (of course, my paranoia tells me that Blizzard occasionally themselves seed the Auction House to make a percentage, but that’s just my theory).
From personal experience, I feel that Magic Find is working as intended. As I progress in improving my Paragon levels I can see a clear difference in the quality of loot. Most items on average are junk, but before the stats were even worse. I rarely could find anything of note. At the moment, I have been finding better rares and almost one legend per run. The thing I’ve come to accept is that it simply takes time and effort to obtain these items. But they’ll eventually come down the pike.
On a slightly unrelated note, I think if you expect to get legendaries all the time with the best stats, you’re out of luck. You simply cannot play a game like this and get everything that you feel you deserve. That’s why I feel that the only way to really obtain items is to combine your effort with different goals like obtaining Paragon levels or getting keys. Otherwise, you may feel disappointed more often than not.