Sorry if this is the 1000th rant post like this put I just needed to get this stuff off my chest. First the positive: -Kepler is a cool destination, I for one like Matterspark and the Teleport cannon -Story was great, Lodi and Orin are amazing characters, well written and a good addition to the cast Now for everything else: -Light level system sucks. I can't see how much I am over A-Tier rewards, so Ill never know 100% if it's gonna be enough. I just did Oracle BG, killed everything, had 5 min left on the clock... still didn't hit A-Tier despite the game telling me A-Tier while launching, wth -Your own CURRENT light-level influencing your rewards is also bs, with one loadout I can reach A-Tier, with the other I wont... great. -Upgrading one piece of armor from 200 to 400 (for alt chars) takes 7k unstable cores equivalent to 12!!! pieces of loot on 400. why? And I would not even complain so hard if I would do this once a year and Im done. No. I can farm some more in 3 months and get reset in 6 months to do it all over again? Run Encore or some other years old content 500 times? Naww... -Old Raid and Dungeon content was completely left behind, it drops old system armor (worthless) and weapons I already have every roll I want/craft. They don't give powerful gear... like not even one raid/dungeon per week? come on bungie. -New Raid drops Tier 1 armor and weapons, equally as worthless. Tell me how many times with how many feats do I have to clear the raid to have A CHANCE to get something I can really use? -Contest Raid: -70% of all runs cheated, how does this happen bungie, whats going on? -brutal dmg checks, where loadout-swaps (after bungie activly DISCOURAGING it), optimal gear/stats (after 4 days with a new system lol), optimal team comp (2 warlocks 3 Titans for dmg almost mandatory), optimal play (now mistakes, xenotaph marking all enemies for ammo or switching roles to get enough ammo through clear) was needed to get close to completing the encouters... ... I couldn't complete SE, which was fine, my team fought, we lost, all good, it felt difficult but fair. A puzzle encounter was hard so it took long to complete. This raid had our team demoralized after like 6 hours. We couldn't do -blam!-. Didn't clear one lousy encounter. Major Harpies took 2 mags each with an SMG... while there are like 6 in my room and dmg was so tight, Hydra was down half HP after 2 phases with Thunderlord.... Probably the worst experience I have ever had with Day1/contest raiding and I have been trying/completing since CoS. -Raid itself is okay. Mechanics are cool but unintuitive to figure out, no real feedback if you do smth wrong. Raid feels small... The backtracking from the encounters feels unnecessary and I don't even know how to get back from Agraios (Sniper) encounter without MT and eager edge, like wtf is this? Where is the way up? We need to pull 4 ppl every time. So yea. Story and Kepler Team I love you, great stuff. But whoever thought of the current sandbox/gear system and whoever designed this raid, especially QA on contest... What the actual f*ck where you thinking? You know a game is supposed to be fun right? Contest would maybe make more sense if we were able to use grand overture (like that one QA guy said) and you told us the power delta was messed up (skulls instead of swords) and we were like 10 or 20 power weaker than we were supposed to be. THEN maybe. But like this? Literally alienating so many players with the grind that was required in 4 days to have loadouts with 200 weapon and super, NEEDING to loadoutswap like 4 times per dmg phase, having an optimal team comp AND 95% perfect execution to have a shot at doing enough dmg. Mechanics were not the problem, not the encounter themselves, it was doing enough DMG/getting lucky with ammo in some cases to be able to clear. Having 1 dmg check is okay, but like 2-4 if f*cked up, that is not what raids are about. Deeply disapointed, pretty much killed my excitement for the new DLC and even the game itself pretty much the same as sunsetting back then, overshadowing the great story/campain/destination you also delivered. But everything just has a bitter aftertaste, especially after that catastrophic contest / general raid experience. Just wanted to share my feelings, feel free to comment or add your own. Thanks a lot if you took your time to read all that ranting. Please do better than this Bungie, bc this was certainly not it. Don't f*ck over the players that stayed with the game now. See you Starside (or not ^^)