Loot Issue

Recently started a ssf merc, campaign was fine.
Ascended into tactician and made it to T15 so far, doing fine on bosses n stuff.
Issue is that i'm playing xbow ev/es, so dex/str mainly and some int to meet body pieces reqs.
It's only dropping int based armour pieces and every weapon but crossbows, not talking about decent/top notch xbow, not even blue ones. They are so rare i'm still using a level 67 xbow and low level gears to play maps level 79.
Not feeling progression at all, is it normal??

Maybe I can give some advice, as I recently leveled a Crossbow Merc and I am also cruising T15s and refining my gear.

After a few hours of chaining t15s that I have juiced up with expedition and rituals as well as the atlas nodes for essences, I find that I have around 1-1.5M gold.

I blow ALL of it gambling crossbows. I fill a quad tab and honestly sometimes I do this 4x in a row before I'll start looking at them and just keep doing waystones (I have a tab hoarding problem lol).

From here, I go in and look at my Xbows and there's a series of decisions that I make as I evaluate them. The first step is filling my inventory with augments, regals, exalts, chaos, and the greater essences of haste/torment/battle and the ritual omens for exalts/regals that add suffixes/prefixes that I've collected. I will just spam augments indiscriminately across all the bows to start to make sure the blues have at least two affixes.

first step - I will look at the BLUE xbows, and depending on their affixes - their tier and type, I will decide if it's worth regaling/essencing/using omens to make them rare. If I don't have any essences or omens to use but I have a tremendous excess of regals, I will basically just spam-regal every blue into a rare.

The next step is to examine your rares and their affixes and here is where you really need to prioritize what you're looking for - you're not trying to land a magical "perfect" weapon our of the gate, you just want to identify high tier affixes that are important to you (My merc mostly wants IPD, hybrid IPD, flat phys, and APS).

It's just a matter of exalting, chaos-ing and recombing and using omens from here on out where you think they'll be the most impactful. Sometimes if I have a t1 mod like Flaring I'll try to fracture it to "preserve" it incase the rest of the craft goes bad so I might have some kind of recourse with my small handful of annulments but I haven't hit a useful fracture yet.

The "failed" crafts go into the reforge, where the reforged item is another dice roll of affixes to repeat the above. I usually end up with a small handful of xbows to carry over into reforging the next session.

I will say that I did this up until the point where I crafted an xbow with T3 IPD and T1 Flat Phys on a Desolate Xbow base and an improvement for me at this point would be a Siege base with similar phys DPS and even a low-tier APS affix - it's still been enough for me to handedly complete all content even with the current bow.

The above technique works for any gear piece too. I've made a lot of excellent rings and amulets this league this way which has made juggling all the other gear pieces much easier to fill and upgrade because I always have supporting jewelry to cap resistances and hit attributes stashed away. It takes some the pressure off of suffixes for other defensive gear slots which makes gearing overall very smooth.

nice write up above, i will just add that once you have 200+ regals filtering out rares you don't need in helps out a ton in ssf as it saves you a lot of time while mapping, which helps you clear faster and ends boosting your drops of interest. so less is more kinda thing. i'm still hunting for a +skill xbow and i swear to god they are everywhere, to the point im starting to run out of wisdoms.

Thanks, definetely a next league plan, i started ssf late so currencies arent that much. I'll keep going with i get for now.