Mixed feelings.
1) the story missions are quite good, and a definite step up from TDB
2) the strike is a great length, paced well, etc. Really enjoyable to play
3) taking mats out of the NF loot table appears to have indirectly increased exotic drop rates. Anecdotally, my group's drops and the screens people have posted here have been just lousy with exotics. Strongly approve of this. There are still shenanigans like 10 strange coins, but the overall change seems positive.
4) PoE is a welcome supplemental activity. We only did the 28 as 32s and still managed to wipe once or twice, but I'm sure most of us will have this on farm through the 34 version presently.
5) apparently needing to farm for keys is absolutely insane
- I have no idea how Bungie manages to shoot themselves in the foot with SOMETHING every damn time.
- This could very well kill the activity for me, and it wouldn't surprise me if it did for a lot of groups, because if there's nothing you can do to GUARANTEE a key in a set amount of time, that means groups can't make certain plans to run PoE together each week.
- I farmed chests for ~3 hours (double- and triple-dipping where possible) and only pulled 1 key; you can't expect groups to spend hours farming chests just to run PoE. The guaranteed weekly cores are going to lose their luster after a few weeks (you can easily imagine the "give me something to do with all these extra cores!" posts), and the lack of a guaranteed exotic drop will likely depress the numbers of people playing it in favor of other activities.
*snip*
I agree with a lot of what you say here, especially about the keys. It seems like the commendations thing from TDB - a convoluted solution to a problem that didn't really exist, and I suspect like commendations it will become less of a problem a month or two removed from today.
I also loved the new missions and strike, although I'm frustrated that I may still have to do them again just to unlock PoE (does anyone have a workaround for this?).
Unlike you though, I had a ton of luck with drops. From two PoE 28 and 32 runs, I already have the following PoE weapons :MG (two actually), the launcher, and the hand cannon. As HayBro can attest, when we were decoding engrams I was rolling legendaries left and right from blue engrams and rank-ups. I already have 3 of the 6 vanguard and crucible vendor weapons without buying any of them and a bunch of other ones; it's kind of overwhelming. Bought the Deadshot Luna which is awesome and the Red Hand. Rolled duplicate versions of TLord, IB, Plan C, and Suros - all shards.
No exotic armor or weapons though. Has anyone seen an exotic weapon yet? Or are they all tied to bounties?
I think Hay and I were planning on putting in some more prison time tonight, maybe trying our luck at the 34.