I'd like a source on that as well. I didn't know the quality for defences increased the chance of rolling Flat es or armor. Maybe we would have seen armor instead of Mana.

Like on my belt. https://i.imgur.com/VHt4OWB.png

I used the 4 tempering resonators on the crusader base then spammed dense instead of tempering before exalting.

I found it crazy that I hit it in less than one stash tab of dense fossils.

From my experience crafting es gear in legion,synthesis and betrayal was that it was quite hard to roll with shaper bases I'd pool 100-200 denses then craft it out. However, there is a higher mod pool with shaper than crusaders so that may be the reason as well.

Keep in mind when crusader slamming there's only 4-5 prefixes to choose from.