My thoughts on The Taken King reveal

In general, I feel like Bungie has taken some huge steps forward, while at the same time taken a few baffling steps backwards. Those who know me know that I'm a pretty staunch Bungie defender, and am usually the one to take their side, even when it's unpopular to do so. That being said, I'm left somewhat disappointed by some of the things we were shown today. For instance: faction allegiance is a great idea, so we can wear whatever class item we want, right? Well no, cuz now certain class items have better perks, so you'll be locked into wearing the best one. You'll also be locked into that faction for a week, which seems a bit restrictive. Same goes for gear. With Etheric light, we could take whatever we wanted and max it's power; now we're back to the way it was in vanilla, being forced to wear whatever the most powerful piece we were lucky to have drop. Granted, you can apparently take that more powerful piece and sacrifice it to something lesser to increase it's stats, but it's unclear how many max level items you'll need to dismantle to get a lower-tier item up to the max. Seems very grindy, and the opposite of the streamlined approach they were going for. I'm also not really seeing how separating your light and level is fixing whatever they thought was broken about that system; as long as certain gear has better light values than other stuff, that will always be what we use. Then there's weapons. Having to burn an exotic shard and 2500 glimmer everytime you want to extract one from the kiosk seems a tad expensive. Only bringing forward certain ones (at least at first) also seems like a somewhat arbitrary decision. Gjallarhorn needed a nerf, no question, but being completely left behind? Seems excessive. There was some genuinely great things too. No weekly cap on earning legendary marks is a great improvement, as is sharing them across characters and having all vendors accept them. All the new quest and bounty improvements are amazing, including the gunsmith and arms day. I loved some of the new perks that were shown, like Solar resistance. Also HEAVY WEAPON SWORD!!!! And then there's the vault. You beautiful bastards found a way to double it, and I could kiss you for it. Now, I'm sure within a month it will be completely full again and we'll back to square one, but for now it's a nice hefty chunk of space to collect toys in. So that's a few of my thoughts that I wanted to share. I'm still super-hyped for Year 2 and exploring the vastness of the Dreadnaught with you Reapers, but I suppose my expectations were set a bit too high by House of Wolves' introduction of deeper customization.