So are you guys complaining about loot independent of progression? Because I've been told you need to just but your legendary and exotic equipment (I'm still lvl 23 so my understanding is limited). You're just saying you want new stuff, basically?
The loot system is bunk, top to bottom.
First, we have drops and how it's integrated in each various mode. Strikes, which take a pretty solid chunk of time, don't appear to be weighed whatsoever to reward or up the frequency on drops. You have the same chance of an enemy spitting out a legendary engram an a level 8 strike vs. the level 24 vanguard playlist variant, which means you're essentially fighting harder and getting little out of it. This also is why you see the farming spots like the cave or the moon mission where the door opens and hive rush out, as it just leads to high amounts of kills at a pretty rapid click, which is basically the way to brute force the game to give anything. Aside from that, the actual endgame rewards are, again, a total crapshoot, heavily leaning on the crap end. You go through a 30 minute strike, and get a random blue engram that turns into a green! Hooray. Despite bungie games having huge amounts of detailed stat breakdowns, the game itself doesn't acknowledge or care about it in any way. Did I kill the most enemies, output the most damage against the boss, beat the strike without going down and have multiple revives on top of that? The game really should start weighing the drops to reward that guy, because that player was a huge reason why it was even a success. Instead, and here's something that actually happened, my friend was searching for a strike and got put into one mid-mission, that was actually just about to kill the boss. He didn't even get to fire a single shot, got a legendary out of it...I think the other players got a shader. This is to say nothing of the bosses themselves not even dropping stuff, it's always just things on the post-mission screen.
I sorta get why the actual drops happen as they do, Bungie didn't want to gate the endgame solely to Mars. If the loot isn't scaled, there is very little reason to patrol in the early game planets beyond finding materials, but the issue is how the worlds themselves are all connected across game modes causing the issue to seep into everything. But there's no excuse for the poor strike payouts.
Then there's PvP...which I have a lot of the same issues with. Again, I can get their mindset, keep it random so people who aren't good at the game can still obtain drops, be happy, and want to keep playing. But that could still happen, along with it once again just weighing specifically towards the best player on the team to get something nice. That doesn't necessarily mean rain exotics/legendaries from the sky, but there are SO many times where I see the worst players get good stuff and literally nothing drops for the top, for multiple games in a row. It is infuriating and actually turns off the people who are putting in the effort. This is also why people are AFKing in the games, as the game's luck of the draw nature gives that guy with his control stick jamming him into a wall for the entire game has just as much of a chance at getting stuff as this guy who is bringing his team to the top. But the AFK guy has the advantage in not needing to be paying any attention, and can burn through many games in a row having chances at the end of all of them. A small but infuriating part of this is also how much of the game is hinged on shoving this right into your face, as the post-match screen automatically brings you to the stats where you see drops and hangs on this screen for 10-15 seconds which just makes you stare and shake your head.
Speaking of shaking your head, there's the engrams themselves and the crazy amount of variables these give out. A legendary engram, more often than not, has been really underwhelming for me, because they can(and frequently do) degrade in quality. You will see these turn into blue armor that is worse than what you have on, a lot. BUT, that's not all. It can also give you materials or currency. Which...doesn't feel great, though it's helpful in the long hall. And still it can turn into an actual legendary!...for any class. Unlike any other engram or rarity piece, a specific stipulation made only for legendaries is how it may be for any class. So it feels like multiple layers of bullshit for the player. Dice roll, actual purple, or blue, or random material altogether? Purple! But we aren't done, because now there's a 3 way split on what class it ends up on and if you can even use it. That is far too many variables, and so frustrating for the player to go through. Hell, due to the game works, it sometimes feels bad getting a legendary weapon, since if you were like me and stuck in the struggle wall at 24 the gun doesn't help you, only armor has light.
But yes, this can all be 'avoided' by gaining a bunch of reputation and marks, leveling up factions and buying it yourself. Which is so incredibly underwhelming that I can't even properly describe it. Doubly so when Bungie actually said they wanted an epic story for each piece of gear you obtain, I'm not sure how epic my tale is when my exotic arms, legendary chest and legs were all store bought, because the game has refused to actually give me anything else. Because of how many systems in this game are connected by decisions like this, once again there are repercussions to this happening. You level 1-20 pretty fast, and I don't mind it slowing down a lot after that. But a hard wall does happen at 24, where the best rare armor with the highest light maxed out only gets you a little over halfway through it, and I was stuck here for awhile. Something drops can do is dripfeed you progress, you move up little by little. The "BUY ALL THE THINGS" method is a fucking floodgate that opens all at once. I went from slowly moving to 24, smacking into a wall for awhile, to leveling up the crucible guy to 2, then shooting up to the 26 I'm at since I swung around and also bought exotic gauntlets from Xur. There is no small progression this way, there's just an entire storefront of legendaries being primed for the picking, with an awkward currency lock to try and cap how much you make each week since I guess they didn't know of another way to handle it. Again, just very unsatisfying heading this route, and no interesting tales of how you obtained things when instead the internet is filling with videos on how to robotically approach each planet for the maximum amount of material and chest farming, picking up patrol missions to get rep, and schedules for the public events for people to get more materials. Because after you take the leap beyond 24, you then rely on a whole truckload of rare materials to level everything up and gain more light.
For even more randomness, there are Exotic bounties. There are players who have played the game a whole bunch and have yet to have this show up, meanwhile I got two of them back to back. They give a guaranteed exotic weapon, though you have to go through a pretty large amount of stuff for each one. Still, the completely random nature, again, will frustrate players who play a lot and just keep thinking "why in the hell does this game refuse to give me any of these?", especially the grindy ones like what I have now for doing 25 strikes. That's rough enough with only 6 in the game, but worse the longer you play without having it knowing you aren't making any progress towards it even via strike playing.
Beyond all I feel like i'm still forgetting some reasons on why the loot is so bad, but there's a rough gist from me. I have played many games with random elements and drops, but I can't think of any that outright frustrate the player so frequently.
