It's very infuriating seeing these pieces go to people who can't use them, or even worse, to mules.
Perhaps part of the game balance is not encouraging people to dual box a character so they don't have to share loot with as many people.

That it is even viable to play a rapidly leveled character remotely as efficiently as someone who is maining the job while you are maining something else shows a problem.

Watching your dual boxed mule get all the loot you want because you can't bother to include someone else is a bit of dev justice in a way, as it punishes the behavior.

Perhaps the system is broken with players having to watch friends who never will use the gear get the drops they want you to get, but this is a positive side effect, given that this game is an MMO, not a play with little people as possible so you can have a monopoly on leet gear massively online game.

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The other thing that this drop system punishes are point systems that screw over anyone who isn't the LS leader or a good friend of the LS leader.

It is going to be hard enough to "fix" the system to let people get the gear they want without going back to something that SE was obviously trying to avoid, short of a system involving getting some sort of IOU for varying pieces of gear that are still exclusive. Hopefully SE can accomplish its goals while still pleasing the reasonable parts of its playerbase.