Here's how this works. You can purchase for 65 marks from the vangaurd either boots and arms without a commendation. You can get an exotic chest or helmet from xur or nightfall. You need a commendation to buy either the missing chest or head that you don't currently own. You will earn a commendation when you rank up your vangaurd which can be done very easily.. How? Well think about it. Doing nightfall = about 450xp to vangaurd. Doing weekly afterwards earns about 500xp to vangaurd. That's nearly half your vangaurd level there. To buy the gear which people have no issue with you need to complete the tiger strike (DLC owners the RRC strike) and get the 6 marks at the end of each one. Now if you have the nightfall mod on then you will get 31 vangaurd from that each time. So aprox you would need to beat the strikes 80 times to get to 2500 xp. But you also completed the weekly and nightfall and you're now sitting nicely on 1000ish xp. Now you would need to complete 41 strikes which will be a lot but there is another way to lower this. Vangaurd bounties make a big chunk of that xp needed to disappear so you should do them and can get gear in a day or so depending on how long you play for if doing all above methods before hand. Now once you get the commendation you can also get an engram from the postmaster which may turn into the piece you want. If you're doing the RRC playlist then farming blue engrams has a better chance turning Into purple from my experience since the DLC was released. The commendation system works perfectly and in no way affects how the system worked last time as you still do bounties. You still do weekly. You still so nightfall. You still do strike playlist. You still need to collect marks. And you'll still level up doing all that. People whine about it because they don't see THIS ^ anymore but rather follow the group who hates it.