Ok, speaking from the point of view of someone who's still in school(and will be in school through the summer) and who works part-time, between 24 and 30 hours a week, I don't see how etheric light is any different from radiant materials. By just playing trials or just playing prison, the combination of etheric light, armor rewards, and ascended exotic armor(which doesn't take etheric light), hitting thirty-four really shouldn't be too difficult or time-consuming. You can run the 34 PoE as a 33 (what my team and I did) or just wait a week for new armor rewards and BAM! 34 character on week 1-2 of the DLC. If I remember right, wasn't the Dark Below much more time-intensive? So what's changed? If you're just having problems ascending all your different weapons, I don't think that you were meant to go in with all 365 weapons on week one or you were expected to use some 365 vendor weapons till you ascended your old favorites. I'm trying to keep in mind of course that everyone's situations and amount of available time are different, and I feel that HoW (well, Destiny in general) is definitely workable for the average player. Yeah, you may not be max level with max gear on week one, but does it really matter if it takes till week two, or hell week three? EDIT: I don't remember who suggested it, but I do like the idea of adding etheric light to raid drops, if only to add incentive to revisit them.