As many of you know, there wasn't as much content renewed last tuesday to allow bungie to fine tune the release of TTK. No daily missions, bounties seemed more repetitive than usual, and various other things happened which left all of us with no excuse but to try out the crucible and get crushed by the people who have spent the last year honing their skills. Then, today came and those who have purchased TTK got a swath of new content, new missions, an entire new endgame to dig into and are having a great time. This post is not about those people. I haven't purchased TTK. Partially due to my discontent with how bungie has released content and partially because I didn't want to be suckered by false promises. I'm giving it some time to see what people think of it, see if the raid is good, see if it's really worth 40$. But I decided to jump on anyways, today, and see what I could do without the expansion. What I found was not much at all. Daily, Weekly heroic and nightfall missions are all gated off. Now it's not to say that these won't cycle through to older missions, but bungie seems to have set the new game to 'only level 40' mode, so who's to say that next week won't be undying mind with a level 40 requirement slapped on it? All Vendor gear is now locked, old vendor gear is gone completely and I'd assume unobtainable. The only gear that you can buy is from your vanguard mentor- uncommons with few perks and only some with 170 defense ratings. The vanguard legacy playlist is a shadow of what the old vanguard strike playlists were, providing paltry rewards and seemingly no legendary gear- compared to what you could do two weeks ago. All "kill objective" missions while patrolling lead to Taken, who you are unable to kill due to the high level difference. This effectively renders them unbeatable unless you have a fire team member who owns the expansion. crucible now only lets you select between random 3v3 or 6v6 match types, which is paltry compared, again, to what you could do two weeks ago. Level select on missions is gone, you can only do the mission on the default difficulty- this devalues content even as there are legacy quests being re implemented to give gear with 2.0 the wandering wolf packs are gone, along with being able to level up queens wrath (at least I haven't found any way besides grinding the story missions endlessly). Doesn't seem like there's a way to earn legendary marks, so you can't purchase planetary materials. Back to farming Venus for some more spirit bloom, then. all Eris bounties are gone, and her item selection has been culled (so that's what, half of the dark below?) on a slightly less objective note, the jump from year one gear to year two gear means that for someone with the expansion, there's very little reason to play VoG, Crota's end or PoE. I spent an hour on /r/fireteams attempting to get a group for anything, and failed. I'm not asking for Bungie to give free content for those of us not yet willing to drop 40$. Everything I've mentioned here was content that was available only two weeks ago that has been removed from the game. This experience of trawling through the game searching for content has made me much less likely to purchase The Taken King due to the fact that I feel I'm being forced into buying it to regain access to what I previously paid a fair amount of money for. 95$ wasn't enough? I have to pay more to get my vendor gear back? I have to pay more to be able to do weeklies again? So, I guess as a warning to the rest of you- be grateful for what you've got now, because if you get left behind there's no promise that it won't go away.