Can't agree with vendor gear not getting you to one under max. Not because I disrespect the effort of Raiders to overcome the VoG grind, or because of any nonsense about handouts. (I actually hope to be a CE raider soon. Finally getting together a robust enough friends list of regulars. :) Only because they're simply paralleling the original level structure. 29/31 for legendary, 30/32 for raid/exotic. The deeper problem is the two level cap increase is so small as to be pointless. They might as well have only increased it by one level and allowed new vendor gear to tie previous raid gear. (It would be representative of the Vanguard as a whole advancing in an arms race against the Darkness.) People who had already completed the raid would have been good to go from the outset. Christmas noobs and those who hadn't done VoG (for whatever reason) would have needed new gear regardless. I agree that something should have been done to bump up previous raid gear by one level. An exchange/upgrade path for people that already had it and new drops should have come in at level 31. And the whole gear quality determines level instead of level dictating what you can equip? Plus gear acquisition relying on pure RNG or else heavy grinding through arbitrary bottlenecks? I think it's just going to continue causing this type of issue.