Well grind for better drops, whatever you don't use either break it down for optimization materials or if they have a single good stat use it then to update your recalibration. The rest is just time and grind, use targetted loot to get what you are aiming, either be brand sets, specific type of gear (masks, kneepads, gloves or gear sets), try to stack gear and talents with synergy between them towards your playstyle (armor for tanks, crits for full auto weapons, headshot for snipers, status effect for some type of skill builds, cooldown for others and so on)
There are several methods to use that will help you build up your gear but all of them require time to be invested, there's no quick and easy path to great gear. Some of the methods below will help you achieve whatever it is that you want from your builds:
1. Know what you want to build, the required talents, the rolls, the brands and specifics to each item as this will allow you to plan your efforts at farming.
2. Farm up all blueprints from checkpoints for gear attachments.
3. Fill your library up with talents and rolls as this will go a long way to helping you get the build you want.
4. Craft gear to create templates to work from, and either optimise those templates or use them to learn the build while you farm better versions of it.
5. Keep your material stockpiles high as crafting, calibrating and optimising all require large volumes of each. Farm the sewers and yellow crates.
6. Farm the Summit as it's a convenient repeatable method of farming specific gear.
7. Inch by inch, repeating the above steps to incrementally achieve maxed out gear.
The targeted loot map will show you where brands and gear sets are, you'll have a higher chance of exotics dropping from missions linked to the brand/item from that map and you should farm these as a group -- use MM or a clan. The same can be said for bounties. A rule of thumb for farming is more players == more gear so solo farming is always suboptimal.
The short answer to get started:
- Learn to use the recalibration bench. This is the most powerful tool in the game for improving your gear.
- Build up your recalibration library. For any item you look at, small triangles below the attribute lines will show you the value of that attribute in your recalibration library. Save items that with attributes that improve what you have in the library (marking them for recalibration, similar to how you mark favourites, can help) and use the recalibration bench to break down the weapon and add the better attribute.
- When you find you're not getting drops that improve things, switch to a higher level of difficulty in missions to get better drops.
Put your world on heroic it will be hard off the start but it gets much easier with experience - the loot payoff will be better - join random heroic missions there is always someone looking for players and you can pick up a lot of loot and some nice player might even drop some really good stuff for you. Try to complete your projects you can get good loot some times and of course the weekly exotic cashe for donating materiel.
I don't generally recommend starting with this. It doesn't change what you get from weapon and gear crates lying around the open world, just what you get from drops from enemies you kill. And a Heroic open world can be very frustrating because you're much more subject to being crushed by RNG. (E.g., if you're busy working a control point, it's not unusual for a supply convoy to show up during that, and a Heroic supply convoy will bring in a lot of extra very strong enemies that you may not be prepared to handle.)Originally Posted by BT3241 Go to original post
I would not turn on Heroic in the open world until you feel quite comfortable soloing missions on Heroic.
Yes, this is a much better place to start....join random heroic missions...