It works
(I was supposed to send this earlier, but i had some cookieproblems and couldn´t post...)
Well, a friend of mine had the helm earlier at Europe realm. I tested the helm and it worked (of course i don´t know how much MF the helm gives, but it gives MF).
Why my test is the right one? Well, i can´t see sin316's friends tested
without any MF and then only with the helmet. They probably had some MF without the helmet and then you wouldn´t see any difference.
And when you do the test you should look for yellow (rare) items, because you don´t see that big difference when it comes to uniques, it´s like Jotka wrote: Its all dependent on luck.
How it works:
If you have 0,02% chance to get a pretty good unique without any MF you will have 0,077% with 800 MF (still very little chance). 0,077 = 0,02 * 3,84 (3,84 is 284% increased chance of getting unique items)
800% MF will be:
284% increased chance of getting unique, 391% set, 423% rare and 800% magic.
267% MF which i think is a pretty good number (but i like to have somewhere between 300-350) has:
200% increased chance of getting unique, 225% set, 230% rare and 267% magic.
As you can see the difference of getting uniques isn´t that great with the high MF. These calculations can be found at this site:
http://stats.diabloii.net/calcs/MFcalc.shtml which is a very good site, where you also can find out which moster has the greatest possibility of dropping a specific item. (To check this out, click Calculators if you´re on the main page, then Treasure Class and a new window opens, then click Item Search)
Good Luck, Hagel.