So I read these forums a good amount and a common complaint is that "gear is too easy to get" or "purple and exotic gear isn't special and people are already geared". While I can see where they are coming from, the problem is they are not realizing how the game works. So what I'm going to do is relate the gear in this game to an mmorpg with the most amount of players which is World of Warcraft. Alright, so you hit level 20 and have greens along with some level 15 blue gear. Congratulations!, you just hit level cap and your gear is basically equivalent to someone who got max level in WoW. So now you start gearing and you initially start getting some level 16-17 blues. After a bit, you have a full set of lvl 16-17 blues and you managed to upgrade them which gets you to about level 22. Congratulations! Your gear is equivalent to a full set of gear in WoW by doing max level normal difficulty dungeons. Now that you are level 22, level 20 blues start to drop more frequently for you. After a bit of you time you have a full set and you upgrade it all so now you are level 24. Congratulations! In WoW this is equivalent to getting a full set of blue dungeon heroic gear. So now you are level 24 and you get a purple piece of gear. You think to yourself, "Sweet, I got some end game gear!" But unfortunately, in WoW this is equivalent to getting a piece of LFR gear. After a bit of time, you end up getting full legendary gear. So congratulations! In WoW this is equivalent to getting a full set of LFR gear and you are now at level 25! So now you start upgrading all that sweet purple gear you got. You manage to level it up to the second armor upgrade and you notice you are level 27. You also notice however that the only materials it took were glimmer, spinmetal (or whichever the material required was) and some items you get from breaking down other pieces of armor. Well, Congratulations! Because now your gear is equivalent to someone that got a full set of normal mode raiding gear! Finally, you have to get the last set of upgrades for your gear. This is a super grind and it's very difficult. However, after many hours of playing you manage to fully upgrade your gear and you are now level 30. Well, Congratulations! Because your gear is finally equivalent to a full set of heroic raid gear in WoW. You can now dominate anything and you essentially beat the game until new content is released. So basically what I'm trying to say is that just because you got a piece of legendary gear, it doesn't mean you are now geared. You are not fully geared out until you fully level them up which requires an enormous amount of time (3-4 DAYS of playtime after getting it upgraded to the 2nd armor perk). You could say that while in Wow you won't get fully geared up withing 150-200 hours worth of playtime, you have to realize that when you factor in the time they play doing actual content which gets them better gear, the time isn't that far off. The difference however is that you are locked out from getting super gear in that game each week after you complete a raid and it's the only way to get the best items. IMO this game would be better off if they had something similar by either just giving gear that you couldn't level up (but either unlock perks like faster reload with gun with motes of light or ascendant mats, kind of like enchanting gear in other games), but gave you better gear for higher difficulty content or make it so you can only get x amount of ascendant materials a week. Out of the two, I think the first option is best one.