1. Increase Legendary Mark cap to 500. 2. Allow all factions to sell their own engrams. That gear drops no lower than your current light level. This would allow us a better chance at gaining the gear we want without having to lower our light. Lessens the grind. 3. Give us another way to level the gear we like. Add an armor smith and give the armor and weapon smith the ability to infuse your gear to the maximum light level one point at a time using glimmer, legendary marks, ascendant materials, radiant materials, etheric light, and moldering shards as part of the cost. The higher the light gets on an item the higher the cost to infuse it to the next level (only works on year 2 items that have the infusion slot. good for leveling gear you are having a hard time increasing the light). lessens the grind. 4. (possible reforge) The smiths should be able to modify our weapons and armor using parts we have collected from other gear. We choose what to keep when dismantling items. A standard dismantle would yield glimmer and upgrade materials. A focused dismantle would yield the perk you want to keep. Example: a rare sniper rifle drops at 270 with the scope you wish you had on your 310 1000 yard. You would focus dismantle the 270 rare for the scope, take your 1000 yard and scope to the weapon smith for forging. lessens the grind. This would make year 1 content relevant by, but keep us using year 2 gear, give us more to do during the week, give us an alternate avenue of leveling up in case we don't get what we need this week and still incentivize raid and nightfall activities as these are the best activities for higher level gear.

The point you're missing is that it's detrimental to Bungie to "lessen the grind". While it seems like a good idea in theory, think how much quicker things would become boring when everybody was using the same God rolls with max levels. The "grind" is the entire business model for a game like this and is what keeps people playing and making bungie money. They're not going to do anything that may compromise that.

if it takes 3 months to hit max level that's fine, but after 6 months I still haven't maxed out even one character. That blows.

I agree to an extent but if they can get somebody grinding for 6 months then that's 6 months of somebody putting hours into their game rather than 3. As players it can be frustrating but to a potential investor or even just to promote future DLC and "Destiny 2" the figures are all that counts. I think the only way to compromise between a business perspective and player perspective is to have multiple options for end game content. That way, the grind would retain its length but the players would have more variety so it wouldn't feel like such a grind. All of this could of course be solved by making the old raids drop 320 gear but if that isn't something they're looking at doing then they need to release multiple raids at once. People shouldn't have to do the exact same content multiple times in order to achieve a goal and challenge mode just doesn't cut it. If multiple raids came out at once then players could at least alternate the content they're playing to break up the monotony.

I completely agree with your point. Maybe I wasn't clear. I'm ok with grinding as long as it's forward. We also need a larger variety of gear and options on leveling that gear to max. I'm aware of the strategy to retain high player count and I'm done with it under the current systems.

It definitely needs some tweaking. I get why things are the way they are so it doesn't get under my skin too much but it should be top priority to make the old DLC (that people paid good money for) relevant. The fact that people are still doing old content now for gear that is widely unusable should really speak volumes to Bungie. It's good content that people enjoy and they don't even have to put too much development time into it as its content that already exists. They need to find that balance because after a certain point even the most die hard of destiny fans reaches their breaking point and that's when the grind starts having a negative effect as they slowly lose their player base.