I play on Circle of Fortune and keep in mind that I am talking about Circle of Fortune unless I specifically bring up trade. Trade has issues that I think should be a addressed and I don’t see as many people talking about the issues with CoF.
Crafting is a big problem due to the high rate of bricking items once you get into the territory of exalted items. This problem gets far worse the rarer a potential upgrade becomes. Potential upgrades start becoming extremely rare very quickly once you’re out of the campaign. The odds of dropping exalted affixes you want are low, the odds of it being a base type that isn’t awful is low, the affixes need to be mostly good, and the affixes outside the exalted can’t be completely empty because the failure rate is extremely high in that scenario. I’ve also played for a long time, and I don’t remember certain exalted modifiers being even half as rare as they are currently. In trade you just buy these items and you can see actual upgrades far faster.
The following numbers are all with glyphs of hope (these also scale UP in FP cost under certain criteria and I’m not certain what it is exactly because its not just total affixes and its not just base type):
Every rune of removal has a 1/4 chance of instantly bricking exalteds. Also it can hit up to 25 FP (30% chance to hit 15 or more FP)
T4 to 5 can hit up to 24 (28% chance to hit 15 or more) (never seen it higher than 24)
T3 to 4 can hit up to 18 (15% chance to hit 15 or more) (I might have seen 20 here b4 not certain)
T2 to 3 can hit up to 14 (I think I’ve seen 18 here b4 again not certain)
T1 to 2 can hit up to 12 (I hardly pay attention to this craft so idk if it even varies)
T0 to 1 can hit up to 18 (This one varies A LOT I’ve seen as low as 12 and as high as 18)
Why did I choose the number 15? Because most items (including exalteds) have around 30-40 FP. Usually, it only two 15+ FP crafts to brick.
These odds easily stack up into the overwhelming majority of items getting bricked (which is fine until you get into the territory of exalted items). You’re also not going to be always using glyphs of hope because of using despairs to target bad affixes, glyphs of chaos to reroll bad affixes, glyphs of order to keep a roll high/perfect (jk these functionally don’t exist because of the risk of high FP costs), and glyphs of insight. I’m not even sure if glyphs of insight are worth using because I don’t really use runes of research which are how you get the glyphs.
Hitting t20 total affixes for what you want/need in every slot is very achievable it might take about 10-30 hours depending upon how fast you are, if you’re going for the highest odds of success in your crafting, if you don’t care about base type, and if you’re using the gambler. Hitting t6 or 7 on any of those modifiers with the rest being t5 is quite the undertaking where it could easily take 10+ hours of farming for one slot to have any affix t6 or 7 and be on the right base type or with all the affixes you want. Having the best possible or even next best affix on any slot being t6 or 7 can take 10+ hours for ONE to show up. If your build needs a +3 or +4 to a skill you should give up on the base type.
Combine this with the fact that the overwhelming majority of the time its gonna be on a bad base means it can literally take 30+ of hours to get the right affix for one slot and the rest of the affixes you need/want. This is also ignoring your sealed affix being something you want and not just you removing a bad affix from a suffix/prefix. Also as you fill in gear and need different resistances or some other modifier to fill in compromises on other gear it gets even harder to fill in. If the slot needs a legendary that isn’t a boss unique its far more forgiving because prophecies will spit out 2LP legendaries like crazy.
With trade these times are far lower because someone dropped the item, didn’t need it, and listed it for relatively cheap. Combine this with the fact that you can find 3LP legendaries on there fairly often and you get a system where progress is FAR faster on trade to the point that CoF looks like its only a good option if you plan on playing 1 character for as long as possible. IIRC CoF was revealed as a system that was a buff on the old system but the boss unique grind is far worse than it was in the past, and the crafting is unchanged.
The 2x increase for LP is imo functionally worthless because it doesn’t really increase what is attainable due to the seemingly logarithmic scaling for LP. True bis is 4LP legendaries in every slot but the terrible drop rates + the time it takes to farm boss specific drops that have just as terrible drop rates makes this statistically impossible and a lot of the time reasonably achievable bis is 2lp in some slots. Also don’t get me started on dropping an LP unique with garbage rolls.
Do I think crafting every slot perfect should be achievable? No, but as it stands getting one slot even remotely close to that looks to be nearly impossible in several hundred hours of CoF. Also because I know people are going to misinterpret perfect I mean literally perfect: the best base, implicits perfect, two t7s (arguable because of making sealed affixes), t5 sealed affix (arguable because of the drop restriction), and all the affixes are perfectly rolled. T5 sealed nonexperimental affix is a niche case of one dungeon and so insanely rare, in this context, it might as well not even exist when talking about exalted gear let alone perfect gear. By itself a good t5 sealed affix on a double exalted is enough to make an item statistically unobtainable so I’d still argue an item is perfect even without the t5 sealed affix.
I don’t remember the grind for exalted items being this bad even back when items could brick. I don’t remember it taking so long to get an okay exalted item. Looking at the buffs of CoF it should be pouring in tons of decent or great exalted items.