Mob equipment drops are much too common

Thank you for your report. We can only track one issue per ticket, and you are reporting several. I’d suggest you search for reports on each of these issues. If you want to pursue them and there isn’t a report, we’ll need some numbers to go on so that we know what we’re trying to reproduce. The tests you did of skeleton drops are great, but I have no idea how that compares to Java Edition.

From the screenshots, it looks like the bow drop rate is about 30-40% (37/90), and the armor drop rate is about 25% per piece.

Oh my, my apologies on that. I will try to gather evidence to see if the skeleton drops are different on Java. As for the structures, I’ll remove that and maybe submit another ticket/check for other tickets.

I can't find the proper drop rates for mob equipment on Bedrock, but I do know that on Java Edition all kinds of mob equipment have an 8.5% chance of dropping.

Here are my bow drops results from killing 100 skeletons with a mele trident, and with a looting III sword:

There are two problems here:

1. The drop rate is way too high. According to the wiki entry for drops, which is presumably based on Java code analysis, the drop rate for equipment is 8.5%. That was also the expected result stated way back in MCPE-13966 before they added equipment drops to the game, and that issue was supposed to be fixed. The issue of no bow drops at all has apparently reverted twice, as it was reported again in 1.2.0.9 and fixed in 1.2.0.22 (MCPE-24591), and reported again in 1.12 and fixed in 1.13.0.5 (MCPE-48891). It's impossible to tell from these reports when the ~25% rate was put in.

2. The looting enchant seems to have no effect. My test sample here is not large enough to draw a definitive conclusion. If anything, @unknown's data from MCPE-48891 suggests that looting increases the rate by 1% per level. That's hardly noticeable with a 25% base rate.

I tested this and can confirm. The base is WAY TO HIGH making tridents and bows and extremely easy grab from drowned and skeletons. Plus armor from mobs is way to easy to get. Making rare weapons like tridents really easy to get. I only killed 4 drowned and got a trident.

Trident drops from killing drowned, 100/trial. The % stated is based on assuming that of the 1000 drowned, 15% or 150 were holding tridents.

The data here show that the drop rate for tridents is ~25% base + 5%/looting level.

Update: I have conducted similar tests of gold sword drops from zombified piglins and found that their drop rate is also ~25% + 5%/looting level. So it seems that the default equipment drop rate for Bedrock is at least 3x Java's 8.5% + 1%/looting level.

Apologies in advance to anyone who's feathers I ruffle with my comment preface but here we seem to have another example of 'nerf Bedrock' because some things seem to be different than Java Edition.  Please consider that the two versions are fundamentally different and have different balance issues.  I think that I now have to preface a lot of my comments in this way since drowned features were pre-nether update.

I can only comment on Bedrock as, like many millions of others, I've never owned or played Java Edition and would prefer bugs to be fixed rather than allowing changes to be introduced through the 'bug' door.

Ok, now on to the meat of the comment.

While I recognise the fact that there does seem to be an issue with the looting effect, the issue of heavy drops is recognised on Bedrock Edition as a useful fact of life. 

I think the original armour drops complaint is a 'works as intended' since true bedrock players would know what to do with the armour drops.

Is it possible that the above tests could be run over a longer period (min 10, 000 actual drowned) to see what the long rate is? I'm thinking that the drops might be loaded to give a few early drops and then even out in the long term (per run) to cater for players that do not want to have to build elaborate farms just to get a few tridents.

From what I'm seeing in the preceding comments, the moment that you can farm efficiently, you can literally provide for a whole community and from a server or realm point of view, it removes the need for duplicate farms, thereby reducing the number of lag machines as a by-product in efficient communities. 

By efficient communities, I mean those communities that have efficient economies.  An efficient economy (imho) is one  wherein player production is diverse enough for each member or team to produce what the others need.

[noob#1]'s comment above raises the question of gameplay impact of the reported issue. The point about Bedrock mechanics not being bugs just because they differ from Java is valid. However, that is not the basis on which I confirmed this report. To avoid confusion I am removing the reference to Java form the summary.

I confirmed the report because in my experience the very high drop rate for equipment negatively impacts gameplay in 2 ways:

1. It makes it too easy to get bows, tridents, and armor (especially enchanted bows and armor).

2. it forces the player to spend too much time and effort managing inventory.

Let me expand on (2). Dealing with equipment drops is a tedious and often frustrating task. Equipment fills inventories quickly because it does not stack. This means you have to dispose of things frequently. Equipment also cannot be sorted for the same reason, so the player has to manually go through inventories if s/he wants some of it. And while some of it is useful, the uses are diverse, which means different things have to be put in different places if you want it. In the end, lots just gets thrown out. But having so many things to throw out is a further burden because the items are likely to get picked back up again, so you have to repeat several times. When fighting a raid, for example, I want to make sure I pick up the emeralds, totems, and enchanted books that drop. In order to do so I need to repeatedly empty my inventory of useless crossbows and saddles, (in addition to the iron tools, which I know are not technically equipment drops). It's hard to say whether it's worthwhile to place a chest to put things into in between the raid waves so I don't keep picking up the same junk when I want to keep inventory space open for the valuable things--hard to say if spending concentrated time frantically rummaging the chest between waves is better than spending blips of time opening my inventory to ctrl+Q items throughout the battle.

I can confirm what each and every one of you have said.

I have a zombie and skeleton grinder of my own, and even without looting 3, I seemed to have picked up way too many bows and armor than before. This only happened after the Nether update.

Affects v1.16.201.

@Benny K.: You can update the Affected Version/s field yourself on your own tickets. There is no need to comment.

Affects 1.17.20.21.

Confirmed in 1.17.2 Hotfix

This can easily be proved by killing a drowned with trident. by killing 10 drowneds with trident, around 3-7+ will drop it (in my experiences). this makes the goal of getting a trident as a "rare drop" negatively easy. It is actually so easy to get tridents/bows/crossbows/armor in Bedrock Edition.

Affects 1.18.12

I play 1.18.32 (that's the most recent version right?) on Nintendo Switch. My friends and I have made jokes about having the looting enchantment on our fists, because we are killing skeletons and getting bows VERY often. I got three bows in a row from killing skeletons with an un-enchanted trident. Getting weapons from zombies and drowneds seem to have normal drop rates (they SEEM to be normal, but they aren't found with weapons that often, so it could be that I simply haven't killed enough to notice), but armor from zombies or skeletons seems to drop about 50% of the time. Piglins and Zombified Piglins also drop weapons and armor very often too now that I'm thinking about it...

Affects 1.19.2

The change to equipment drops in 1.21.0.26 Preview only applies to the drop rate buffs from the looting enchantment and from enchanted equipment, so it is a partial fix to this issue and not a full fix. The base equipment drop rate is still about 20-25%.