You should look up the tiers of powerful engrams. There are 3 tiers. All the easy activies are tier 1. If you are light level 525 and do a flashpoint, you will get a drop at 526. Now you may have an kinetic weapon at 530, but other slots are 522 or 523. It will drop randomly anywhere so you may get it somewhere that helps you or somewhere that doesn't help you. After 520, flashpoints, Crucible, strikes, heroic adventures, story missions, all that only gives +1 because they are tier 1 activities. The nightfall is tier 2 and gives you +5 so you should do the nightfall. The Petra bounties and the raid are tier 3 which gives +5 all the way until 560 so you can start doing those and start leveling up quick. The talisman should tell you what to do next and it seems it is to kill taken which is gives a strike that has a lot of taken in it. You should get the progress in 2 of those strikes.

[quote]at power level 522 i hit a wall and now powerful engrams from activities like flash point give me lower level items than i already got equipped and there is no progress... this new system sucks, almost a month playing after DLC release and im still not even good enough to do a nightfall , let alone try the raid how the fk am i supposed to level up in this damn game where everything is throttled to my disadvantage and activities are locked behind a arbitrary number?[/quote] Be careful when dismantling blues, I'm 533 light lvl and almost dismantled a 535 blue from my gear screen last night. I was doing the 500 lvl strikes so that's gotta be where it came from.

Powerful drops are based on average light not what you have in that slot. I've seen many similar posts but no one I play with is having the issue, sometimes you may get lower in that particular slot but not based on overall power.

Do nightfall’s and dreaming city stuff. Sure you aren’t recommended light but doing things under level equal larger rewards. Those also give bigger increments than the normal powerful gear drops do

Lfg the NF and you will get it done easily. As for the laughable power engrams, I know what you mean. In my opinion it is the prime engrams boosting some of your gear past power engram levels that is causing most of my frustration. Don’t get me started on Edge Transit dropping every other power engram

How much have you actually played in that month? It doesn’t really slow down significantly until like, 550 or so.