One thing that may make a difference is to look at it as two different paths, here. On the one hand, if you're NOT a hardcore raider, you can get vendor gear at DLC launch that will, with leveling, take you past the previous cap but NOT up to the new cap - so you're ideally positioned to do everything EXCEPT the new raid on its hardest difficulty. On the other hand, if you're a raider through and through, you may just be better off skipping the vendor upgrades entirely - your L30 gear from the previous raid should let you deal with the new raid's Normal mode easily enough. From that Normal raid, you get enough new raid-spec gear to get up to the new level cap - which vendor-purchase gear WON'T do - and thus be able to go smoothly into the next DLC module, when it releases. I don't know if this makes sense to anyone but me. I saw a comment from another poster on these forums who sort of put this into perspective for me. Seen this way, to me it makes rather more sense. There's also the brief note about Vault of Glass that it isn't as obsolete as many paint it to be. Sure, the gear spec is suboptimal, but it's a big source of Ascendant upgrade materials, and those are just as useful on TDB purples as they are on launch-era stuff.