I replayed D1 earlier this year, and the grind is nothing like it is now. Back then, we had to worship the gods of RNG for things like you mentioned, some exotic weapons and sort. At least those days we had a decent quest to work on. Now we are running the same activity, the same Lost Sector over and over and over and over. Also back then Xur was useful for most of us. Iron Banner helped a lot of us get past the Forever 29, at least it did for me. So more avenues to trod down to get the gear we needed or could at least use.

My issue is less that the grind exists and more that it’s boring. There is no casual playing if you want rewards. The drop in reward tier if you’re playing a lower difficulty activity is extreme (we’re talking 2 less tiers). So if I want to play Onslaught but not have my teeth kicked in, I’m only getting tier 2 rewards. This makes the grind much more stressful as you basically always have to be on your A-game if the activity isn’t just Caldera… Half the activities are extremely unrewarding of your time investment. This drastically reduces the practical number of activities in the game. The locking of reward tiers to power level means that most people view it as being pointless to grind weapons at tier 3 when they’ll be outclassed a month later. Add on top of all this our rank being reset in a few months and us having to do it all over again every 6. It just kinda becomes deflating and monotonous. D1’s grind wasn’t nearly as bad on that front.

A few mistakes? Brother, they've made 95% of the game totally irrelevant, they've pigeonholed everyone into playing solo, making people run gms & ultimatum content, for chances of power drops. The loot is very stale, the play loop is even staler, people's motivation is in the toilet, PvP has never been worse, sales were awful, player numbers are dropping through the floor. In such a crucial time for bungie they've totally messed up, beyond repair now, & with huge games coming soon that'll decimate all unhappy player bases out there ( battlefield 6, borderlands 4, black ops 7, new GTA, & lots more I forget) & destiny numbers already very low - a few mistakes is a gross defense attempt of what they've done. You guys don't realise yet but they're killing the franchise & doing a great job at it. This game is dead, people are realising every day. & yes I've played 11 years, tens of thousands of hours, I've done every grind ever delivered, yes I'm 450 & I've barely played since I hit 450 because outside of levelling there's nothing to do. I'm sure Sony won't see it as a few mistakes 😂

Respectfully, you can't be serious. (And yes, I've been here since D1...and?) We're grinding the SAME activities, over and over. Same locations, same items in game from YEARS ago. More grind with less content, for more MONEY. Win-win for them. That's not "pleasing" anyone. That's greed, pure and simple. They are giving minimal effort for cash, and it sucks. And to top that, they artificially increased the grind, to substitute for actual content. Got rid of dungeon pinnacles, (watch how quickly they "sell" it back to us), Gambit, etc. I'm glad our opinions vary.

This level of grind is absurd

Opened a can of worms there. Every single player in the forum is a day 1 alpha vet 🤣

I agree with what you say. I still love D1, but this feels nothing like it, it's just boring. I don't know why, it just doesn't have that feeling of anticipation, that sense of magic.

So how many times in D1 did we have our gear sunset or power levels reset?

The game had moved on from the D1 grind and become a fun form of grinding. This current format is D1 grind minus the fun. At least that is the case for me.

pfft i been playing week 1 of d1 & i was pissed xur sold gally. I was short of 1 strange coin