Thanks again Hawkian for that walk through of VoG NM last night. I had never seen 2 of those encounters (one being the Gorgon maze), so it was nice to get a taste of that. Excited to do HM at some point! That said, you taught us about checkpoint magic for chests, so if nothing else, I'll have to try and steal that from someone before reset (I don't think I'll have leveled my gear enough by then to feel comfortable in HM).
Onto general progression, what do I do to start obtaining better/strong weapons? Is it just luck? Or just run bounties and such for rep to buy better guns?
bolded -> Hawkian has gone to the dark side...
As for weapons, running raids is a great way, especially hard mode. A lot of the best legendary weapons in the game drop from the two raids, some of which are exclusive to hard mode (e.g. Fatebringer in VoG), some are exclusive to normal mode (e.g. Black Hammer in CE) and some are found in either difficulty (e.g. Vision of Confluence in VoG).
You can buy stuff from the Tower using marks, get stuff to drop in random Crucible matches or Strike playlists, or drops from Prison of Elders chests. But most of these are not as good as the raid stuff, and will require you to get lucky with the perks either on the drop itself or by re-rolling at the Gunsmith.
You need to be level 3 with a given Tower faction to buy their weapons so that requires a lot of reputation grinding mainly through bounties. The only downside for raid weapons is that it depends on lucky RNG and you can only run each raid once per week per character. If you run normal mode first, you can run hard after and still get drops but not vice versa.
he asked for a two month ban
Good to know, thanks for the heads up milkham!