Not to contribute to the detritus of these forums who just want to be contrarian and unhelpful, but you are absolutely fine running gally ATM, you can typically get by with 2 pieces of unfeatured gear, it's when you hit 3 you really start feeling it. However, I agree with your point. It should never feel like a requirement to use featured gear to progress, and it certainly does. Their system undermines what could be a cool feature. There would be nothing wrong with the system if they.... 1. Didn't seemingly require mostly new gear to achieve optimal score. A small bump in score would be great if it just made it easier for each new piece of gear instead of making old gear feel like an anchor you're lugging through each activity. 2. Rotated more often, possibly once every 3 weeks. So we can truly experiment with different builds. 3. Barring #2, use the list to highlight exotics that have been buffed/reworked and synergies with the artifact. This combined with #1 means no one gets punished for using gear, but new lights and players who have taken a hiatus will have a nice reference for what gear to invest in first. 4. Hopefully this will happen in the future, but having the featured gear also work hand in hand with class reworks/additions, i.e If we get a new solar grenade aspect/rework for warlocks, have sunbracers featured. If any of you power scalers want to disagree, I have three 400 characters, pushing 403 for my account power. So don't bother, I'm not the 200s you try to bully out of their valid opinions and feedback, take that nonsense back to your basements.