After staying up way to late and not being able to sleep because it's currently finals week I came up with this idea and actually thought it might be a good addition to the current end game. I also believe that hating on the end game and not proposing an idea to fix the problem is not helpful.
The idea is basically using the raid location like the raid lairs do and adding to them. You would enter the area through the director like you do with story missions. The way you would get these missions is through a vendor. Each mission is has a certain set of loot that can drop from the sections of the strike. One of these pieces of look would also be the new end game goal, weapon fragments. The strike would consist of 3-6 players entering with the difficulty changing based on how many people joined. Also this would offer matchmaking like the current strike playlist does to allow players to grind this while other members of their raid team does life stuff. These strikes would be somewhere between the difficulty of a strike and a raid. Each strike would involve several sections and mini bosses that would each have a chance to drop a piece of gear from the loot table. The interesting part is people don't have to stay for the whole strike allowing for a varied duration and people could potentially join in progress (not entirely sure how that would work but I have to leave something for Bungie to design). An example of a strike could be where it starts with a defense similar to the Castellum in the Leviathan raid. It then moves on to a escort mission where waves of enemies come towards you and finally finish with a boss. The nice thing is that these could introduce mechanics of the raid helping to ease players into how a raid would work. I would suggest that there would be somewhere around 5 or so of these strikes per location as this would be a grind for all the players that who are looking to collect all of the gear. I would also suggest that there would be a mechanic that is unique to each strike.
Now on to how this would work and the weapon crafting. The way you would get access to these missions/strikes would be through a vendor who would offer different missions with a different loot pool for each. There would be a mission for each of the raid gear that is new through this system. It could potentially be only be weapons or both weapons and armor. With this system each person who was doing the strike could be working on a different piece of gear but be on the same strike. Each mission you get from the vendor wouldn't have a specific strike you must complete but rather you queue up and match with others for a random strike. Similar the prophecies that were introduced in CoO each piece of gear would have say 3 parts to craft it. once you get all of the parts you can craft the weapon. This weapon ideally have raid specific perks (assuming they added those to the game). Once unlocked it would be permanently unlocked through a kiosk so you aren't at risk of dismantling it and having to grind for it again.
I think this gets out the idea that I had in my head. If you have any questions I would be happy to answer them in the comments.
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I like the idea of weapon crafting. IMO I think Star Wars Galaxies had the best crafting system in any MMO ever. For this game they can take some pointers from there, but this game isn't appropriate to try to install it's full mechanics. Instead, they could have schematic drops where you need to run strikes or raids to get the components. Each component would have different stats bonuses so every gun is unique and not a cookie cutter weapon or armor. Bring the mats and schematic to the gunsmith (maybe introduce an armorsmith ) and here have the weapon/armor made. Depending on the quality of components dictates the output stats. You can even intro elements that would allow experimentation to boost even further, or chance to critical fail and destroy your stuff. I am a game designer, and am working on a system like this for a game. I think your idea would be a good one for Bungie to look at.