LogFAQs > #965228042

World drops make for a more organic gameplay experience, but in games where specific drops can be build-enabling, not being able to target farm those creates an annoying sense of FOMO unless you get lucky enough to have those builds become available (and being locked out of part of a game you've paid for because you haven't been lucky enough to access it kind of sucks). Targeted farming also has the benefit of mixing up the farming process because you need to farm specific targets for each item you want, whereas with world drops, you basically just end up identifying which runs are the most efficient in terms of total number of drops and farming those ad infinitum.

I liked Grim Dawn's approach to it, where there are a lot of world drops that are incremental upgrades, but a lot of the more build-defining/enabling drops can be target farmed. That was made even better by the fact that a lot of useful target farmable items came from more generic enemies instead of bosses (though bosses also had some), so they could be farmed by running entire areas instead of just rushing to the boss. That kept things pretty interesting. Unfortunately, the resist system means that finding incremental upgrades is actually pretty hard, since replacing any one piece of gear pretty frequently drops you below the resist caps and means you need to shuffle a bunch of other items/enchants around to fix that, so it's not as flexible as it might otherwise have been.