Natural drops are terrible/unreliable.
Natural global dropped items need a drastic boost.
These statement’s are made from endgame Min Maxing point of view*
Thats not a difficult question, you don’t even need to think too much about it.
COF functionally allows you to target farm and “print” the same slot/item dozens upon dozes of times in an attempt to provide some form of control over what you need. This alone proves that natural drops aren’t enough for a character. Hell, even the Woven tree, which is supposed to be how you shape your mapping gameplay, is riddled with borderline mandatory “printing” slots to make copies of the items you want.
“oh but in MG you can drop good stuff for other people and buy what you need!”
Not entirely true. First, its entirely reliant on players needing the gear you drop. And with LE the great progression plateaus incredibly quickly, anything but the cream of the crop meta build will rot in your merchant tab. Theres also a reliance on players… playing merchants guild, with the dwindling playerbase which is also split by COF this becomes more concerning league after league. MG players feel frustrated by posting 150 items and selling 0, switch over to COF and the cycle repeats.
The loot in LE overall is not exciting, but mostly cause its too scarce unless you are using extremely bandaid measures to adress it (COF prophecies are effective but boring). The odds of finding a high LP item that actually does something for your character are next to none. The issue here is that IF they were to 10x the drop rates of high LP gear the game progression would just fall apart, since LP is the main gateway to more power and what lets your character tackle higher corruption by combining fucntional uniques with the powerhouse that T7 affixes are.
I don’t know what the fix is, especially when we are already pushing powercreep consistently as it is, but its undeniable that natural drops are not good.