So I was watching some old videos on people's first Vault of Glass run and it put me in a nostalgic mood. I began to remember what my first Vault run was like and how long it took me to be able to even make an attempt. It got me thinking about how long it took to progress in Destiny at launch compared to now so I began to look at my achievements and I was surprised by what it told me. So I thought I would share this with those of you that were new to Destiny during the Taken King expansion or other DLC's. DISCLAIMER: I had a group of friends to play Destiny with at launch but not enough for a Raid group and even when we had the numbers, we weren't really in a hurry to get in there. I play all aspects of Destiny including all the PvE and PvP equally. I am a married father of two boys under five so I play a couple hours at night at most and was able to play around 750-900 hours of Destiny in Year 1. My raid team consisted of old Gears of War buddies. I'm 33 and I'm the second youngest of the group. The below is my experience of playing Vanilla Destiny and is not subject for debate. [b]09/09/14 - Launch[/b] [b]09/18/14 - Decrypt 25 Engrams[/b] It took nine days to get 25 engrams for a relatively casual player. This is probably somewhere between 18-20 hours worth of gameplay. The original loot cave was not common knowledge until around this time and was patched two days later. [b]09/18/14 - Kill 100 Hunters in PVP[/b] It was not a surprise that I would this one first since it was discovered that the Hunter was the best class for PVP during the Beta by the community and the numbers at launch proved it. It was rare to see a fellow Titan in PVP as most matches had between 6-8 Hunters 2-3 Warlocks and no more than two Titans. It was a rarity to see two Titans on the same team and even rarer to see them atop the leaderboard. [b]09/24/14 - Kill 100 Warlocks in PVP[/b] It was nearly a full week of consistent PvP play before attaining this after the Hunter kills. [b]09/26/14 - Kill 100 Titans[/b] Two days later. [b]09/27/14 - Fully Upgrade a Titan subclass[/b] It took me 18 days to fully level my first subclass. 18 days of consistent play. Probably somewhere around 40-50 hours of playtime. This was before people could do nightfalls or even some of the bounties. [b]10/03/14 - Obtain and Equip a piece of Exotic Gear[/b] It was 24 days before I got my first exotic. Patience & Time......end of match reward during first Iron Banner after all my teammates went to bed. I'll never forget it. [b]10/04/14 - Vanguard Rank 1[/b] Seriously, this one blew my mind. You can get to Vanguard rank 1 now in like 12 hours of playtime and it took me 25 days at launch. Just crazy. [b]10/11/14 - Have all Armor and Weapon slots Equipped with Legendary or Exotic gear[/b] Thirty-two days and probably 100 hours later. [b]10/12/14 - Crucible Rank 1[/b] Again, just crazy [b]10/18/14 - Vanguard Rank 3[/b] By this point we were able to do Nightfalls and all the bounties so the rep boost provided by the Nightfall was huge. 25 days to rank 1, fourteen days for the next two ranks. [b]11/02/14 - Complete a Raid[/b] I can't remember when the first time we went into a raid was but it was somewhere at the end of October. My crew was really under leveled until then and we still went it with a couple people at 25ish. [b]11/06/14 - Fully Upgrade an Exotic Weapon[/b] Having an exotic is one thing. Having the Radiant Energies and Shards to upgrade them was another thing entirely. [b]11/08/14 - Fully Upgrade a Legendary Weapon[/b] #priorities [b]12/16/14 - Complete a Raid on Hard[/b] I have no shame in telling you that my raid group wasn't able to beat Atheon on Hard until The Dark Below DLC had been out for a week. We are all older men with jobs and families and play for fun. We continued to run the Vault for the entirety of Year 1 because in most of our opinions, the Vault of Glass is still the best piece of content in Destiny. Miscellaneous: I never got Fatebringer. We raided and we raided and I was one of two guys in my raid group that never got it. I stopped trying when The Taken King came out since I felt like I had already missed out on the experience of using Fatebringer at it's mightiest. It's really the only part of Year 1 I felt like I missed out on. I landed a Gjallarhorn before anybody knew how good it was. It wasn't my first exotic, but I got it sometime in October after the first Iron Banner. It was from a Legendary Engram I got for killing a Cabal Legionnaire during a daily mission and it decrypted into the exotic masterpiece. As the rest of Year 1 progressed my raid team got progressively saltier and saltier about mine. I was one of two raid members to buy Icebreaker when Xur first sold it and the other guy was our relic carrier. This mean that I was the designated Hobgoblin slayer during the Templar phases of VoG. It was a long time before I got to do anything else. The first time we faced the Templar, we did it legit. We cheesed him with Grenades until they patched it because we were all on limited time. I would be lying if I said we never pulled the plug on Crota (just to see if it worked). But to be fair, that bastard was the buggies/glitchiest boss in all of Destiny and he deserved it. He followed us into the crystal room often. Skolas was a jerk. Edit 1: Grammar corrections. Words are hard. Edit 2: It was really hard for any of my crew to do the Queen's Wrath event missions because none of us had any legendary gear by the time it came out. One guy had a legendary shotgun, maybe it was The Comedian but he was able to push us through to get some of the rewards. We were never able to take advantage of the farming of these missions for Radiant Energies/Shards before they patched it either. And we didn't even know things like The Supremacy sniper rifle even existed. Edit 3: My first ever Nightfall completion was Archon Priest with Arc Burn. Dammit, it was ball-crushingly hard but in the end it was worth it. My first ever reward was Thunderlord and I've been bringing the chunder ever since.