The grind in vanilla Destiny was ridiculously absurd. Extremely low drop rates, expensive to buy from vendors (after you managed to rank them up), large amounts of legendary materials required to upgrade weapons and armour, very few avenues to earn end game loot from and nowhere near enough content to justify the sheer amount of grinding. If memory serves the Raid and Nightfall were the only way to earn end game gear (Iron Banner as well but that was only a monthly week long activity, which also suffered from the aforementioned issues). Vanilla Destiny actively disrespected itself and it's players. The loot grind needs to be rewarding and reasonable.
And it doesn't help that you can get to max level easily through weekly milestones or public events which gives players less reasons to do the raid. That's a failure of endgame design as you shouldn't be allowed to get to max level unless you're committed to do the endgame activities like Raiding or Trials.
I couldn't disagree with you more. This attitude of "you shouldn't be allowed" comes off as elitist and pretentious. As I mentioned above, one of the many issues with vanilla Destiny was there were very few avenues for acquiring end game gear. I don't believe max level gear should be exclusive to the Raid and Trials.
It also introduced infusion and with that destroyed a lot of the fun grind.
People were not chasing gear - they were chasing numbers.
Infusion just shifted the grind from Gear (exciting!) to numbers (who cares?)
Here's the thing though, we were always chasing numbers. In vanilla Destiny Light Level was tied exclusively to gear, forever 29 anyone? Each piece of gear had a predetermined light level assigned to it, 26 LL boots, 28 LL gauntlets 30 LL chest piece etc... To be max level you needed a full set of 30 (pretty sure it was 30), light level gear on to be max and the only way to do that was with VoG raid gear, an exotic and/or Iron Banner gear.
Part of what made House of Wolves so great was the introduction of Etheric Light. Being able to decide which gear you wanted to infuse to max level was fantastic as it enabled people to 'max light' (for lack of better words) any weapon or armour they wished. Infusion worked very similar, you could still grind for specific weapons and gear but you didn't have to worry that you'd never be able to use it in the harder activities because it wasn't a 30, 32 or 34 LL piece of high level gear.
the fact remains that your weapons feel useless if they don't have a perfect roll.
I think this is a bit of an over statement and over generalization, I never got a god-rolled Eyasluna but the one that I did have certainly didn't feel "useless".
End game loot for showing up every Tuesday - ridiculous.
This statement isn't accurate at all. You have to actually complete the activities, passing it off as though you simply walk in the door and are handed end game loot is dismissive and misleading.
The biggest issue is lack of incentives. While some people say that Destiny 2's endgame lack content, what it truly lacks are incentives. There are no incentives to do the Raid or Trials because you'll get their respective weapons through clan engrams.
Indeed, you want the gear do the activity.
Destiny 2 has a lot of problems right now, as OP mentioned it doesn't lack content, it lacks incentives. Again, you want the gear, do the activity. Clan engrams giving activity exclusive loot is a mistake, I would rather clan engrams contain generalized loot items like those from the Cryptarch. To be honest, I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about static rolls on weapons and gear. Also the fact that there's no raid specific perks on any of the raid weapons and armour? Missions and Strikes aren't even on the map anymore? No exotic quests or quest page? All of these problems with take time to remedy properly, especially when there's ten thousand people all complaining about what to fix, how to do it. All agreeing and disagreeing, it sort it all out must be a nightmare. I do have faith that the Live Team will improve things over time, they have a lot of work ahead of them. What interests me is how and more importantly why Bungie made all these bizarre design decisions in the first place? Again it seems like two steps forward one step back and I like many others it seems expected better from Bungie.
