There needs to be more rewarding gear progression / base camp ideas
After you hit 3500 score and above getting meaningful upgrades becomes a real slog. Most of the dropped gear is trash, getting a good rank 5 epic or legendary for the set you want can take hours and hours of grinding, and potentially leave you completely without reward. More gold and crystals become meaningless because there is nothing to spend it on.

Now you could improve the drop rate of rank 5 gear, but I myself would prefer to populate the soulless and empty base camp instead:

The Blacksmith NPC: combine two items of the same kind to increase it's rank (e.g. two rank 4 epic weapons get forged into a new random rank 5 epic weapon; or reroll two rank 5)

The Gambler NPC: spend a good sum of gold (e.g. 50k) to buy a 'sealed' level 5 legendary item (you can chose the part); then you unseal it for an RNG roll on the item set/stats

The Innkeeper NPC: spend gold to buy a buff drink for your next run; e.g. 10k gold for increased loot rarity x1 or increased damage resistance (ofc everyone will take more loot; but gold sink)

We need an outdoors inn at the camp with 2-3 NPCs bantering when in range.
Thx love your game, best regard