It got worse.
Way worse.
As of this moment, players are locked out of weekly events (including the Weekly Heroic and Nightfall Strikes, which are necessary for XP boosts and Strange Coins) unless they buy the DLC.
Oh, but there's
more.
Vendors are now carrying Light +33 gear and enhanced weapons, meaning you can now get to level 31 without the RNG.... And completely and utterly dicking over
anyone who did the previous Raid, which did not scale accordingly. If you bought one of the older vendor weapons/items, congratulations:
TOUGH SHIT. Any old legendary gear you maxed still has the same shit stats and thus you need to do it all over again for reasons of
GO FUCK YOURSELF. The entire VoG is now entirely worthless because the Light boosts are lower than the items you can fucking purchase. Even if you're lucky enough to get the nigh-godly gear from the Raid, it has less stat boosts and lowered performance compared to shit you can now buy.
To those that have played through time and time again, only to be shafted by this game's drop system, kept fighting the VoG because that was the only way to level up, congratulations: Your dozens of hours of effort are now entirely moot, because better gear is fucking purchasable. And yet, impossibly, it fucking gets worse. The new gear now requires Vanguard or Crucible Commendations,
which are only earned via ranking up Vanguard and Crucible levels. Unless you already raised those (which most players did) - then you're just
fucked and will never be given the commendations for what you've
already fricking done.
You are now looking at having to level up each faction 4 times
just for a full set of armor that you can now do the new Raid with.
So to surmise:
* You need DLC for Weeklies
* No Commendations for Ranks already earned
* Buyable items that are about 30% better than what the Raid was offering
* But require Commendations, which are now
RNG-chained
* Old Legendaries Now Worthless, even if upgraded (God help you if you had Fatebringer or something)
* Old Raid items now worthless
* Ditto Iron Banner
* Ditto Queen's Wrath
* The entire update essentially is a giant middle-finger to the existing playerbase
GG Bungie.