Not sure if fixing drop rates is the answer, but there are some things that can be changed in the game to ultimately give players better items:
Improve the quality and attainability of good magic, rare and crafted items
By making improvements in this area, it will hopefully make magic, rare and crafted items more powerful and attainable, opening up the variety of progression items and “best in slot” items for some builds.
These changes will also likely benefit melee characters more than casters, which will also go to some length in addressing the caster vs melee balance.
- Add or modify some high end affixes that spawn for magic items only, such as a new prefix above “Cruel” or making “of quickness” available on weapon types that don’t currently have access to this suffix
- Add or modify some high end affixes that spawn for rares and crafted items, such as a making “Cruel” potentially roll higher values
- Increase the effectiveness of some less desired affixes. For example, +min damage (up to 3) on grand charms is awfully low, this should be increased to like 7 or 8. Large charm affixes in particular need the most buffs
- Improve the roll rates on magic, rares and crafted items by removing some “trash” affixes. Who the heck needs Firebolt or Ice Arrow charges anyway? This can be done across the board for charms, jewels, gear
- Make rare items display their colour hints again while unidentified. This saves having to identify each and every rare item to know whether it’s worth identifying and carrying. “if it’s not black, chuck it back”
- Change the rerolling rares cube recipe from 6 perfect skull + item to 3 perfect skulls + item. This makes this cube recipe much more accessible in general, but also opens up the option of using this recipe with 4x2 items
- Add more higher end crafting cube recipes that use higher level runes. These can spawn either better crafted mods, or keep everything else the same but introduce a chance to roll a 5th affix to the item. Runes for this can be in the Dol-Lum range
- Add better sets of affixes to body armours and shields, make rare body armours and shields a more viable end-game option
- If possible, reduce the chances of non-weapon based magic or rare items dropping as ethereal
- And lastly with these changes in mind, add a cube recipe that allows the extraction of socketed gems, jewels or runes from an item but destroying the base item.