I just bought it, downloading now.

I have never played Destiny 1 and have no idea what is going on.

You don’t really need to have played the first game to understand what’s going on. 

There’s some Easter eggs for those who have played D1, but you can jump right into this one and start shooting things and blowing stuff up and be just fine.

Voidwalker warlocks with Attunement of Hunger are probably the most fun solo oriented class/subclass in the game, BTW. 

Did not play D1.  Jumping has been a learning experience and I find I prefer the mods that give more directional control than those that add speed or height.

As for classes, started with Titan and it felt a bit squishy....until I rolled my Warlock.  Learning the different playstyle took a bit, but after getting to L16 on the Warlock in a day and moving back to my L11 Titan, he feels appropriately tanky.  

Voidwalker warlocks with the Devour skill tank and kill almost any and everything the game has to offer. The entire Attunement of Hunger tree is based around self sufficiently murdering every and any thing in sight. 

You can’t carelessly throw yourself into a bad situation, like getting up close to a boss with an AOE stomp attack will probably still get you killed. But against 90% of the ads in the game, a Devour warlock will kill everything and survive anything. 

Doesn't the Devour ability only work when your "C" (melee) attack is ready?  Or does it function during cooldown as well?

It does, but a better way to start your Devour killing spree is by consuming a grenade with the Feed the Void perk.  

Then you start killing things, with kinetic, energy or power weapons, with melees, with supers.  Now the Insatiable perk becomes active, extending the duration of Devour, and recharging your grenade (that you consumed to start your massacre).  The health regen with Devour starts with *any* kill from *any* weapon or ability.  Consuming a grenade to proc Devour in most cases is better than using a melee, since Insatiable will almost instantly recharge your grenade, and you don't have to get up close and personal to punch something to get Devour to proc.  Of course if there's a dreg or thrall or something in your face that you can easily one shot melee, do that, but for anything more dangerous than that, burn a grenade to proc devour and start killing.  You'll get it back quickly, don't worry.

Pair this up with some powerful kinetic weapons that make it easy to 1-2 shot trash and 3-4 shot serious enemies; I like Better Devils, the crucible hand cannon, or Nameless Midnight, the Vanguard scout rifle.  Played smartly, you will basically be a walking juggernaut, constantly killing and constantly regenerating health.  In addition, you've also got your class ability to back you up should things get extra hairy, and IMO, nine times out of ten on a warlock, you should have your rift set to healing.  There's one particular instance where you'll probably want an empowering rift in the raid, but for most everything else, I recommend healing.

How do you consume your grenade?  I just started playing warlock yesterday and hit 16 without really knowing what I'm doing.

Instead of tapping your grenade button to throw it, press and hold it down. 

Got it, thanks!

I topped off at least one, maybe two NPCs with rep while I was leveling up, but someone said I should wait to turn in everything at 20.  Which is it?

There's so much to this game that is not explained by playing.

Yeah, wait unti you’re level 20 to start turning in your planetary materials and tokens. You’ll get legendary quality engrams and you have to be level 20 to decode/equip those anyway. Plus the higher your power level is, the higher power level those engrams will decode at.

Also, let’s do a little explaining about how the world works and what reset is in Destiny, because there’s a particular dude that shows up on Fridays y’all might want to go see. 

So Destiny has a weekly reset. That is, you can complete certain activities and get powerful gear from them once a week. These activities include nightfalls, the raid, crucible, clan XP contributions from just running around and doing stuff, flashpoints, and Trials of Osiris. The week in Destiny resets on Tuesday, 5am eastern/2am pacific.  With that reset comes a different strike for the nightfall, a different planet for the flashpoints, different map for trials, and a different rotation for encounters in the raid. 

Make sure you collect your rewards for completing milestones before reset, because these don’t carry over. If you haven’t hit level 20/completed the campaign yet, don’t worry about the milestones.  You’ll get to them soon enough. 

Now, about that particular dude I mentioned earlier. Destiny has a vendor that sells exotic weapons and armor. His name is Xur, Agent of the Nine, and he shows up on fridays at about 5am eastern/2am pacific and hangs out until reset. In Destiny 1, he only stayed until about 5am/2am Sunday. He can appear on any planet at random, but he’s easy to find, his position is marked with a Roman numeral IX on the map. He brings with him one exotic weapon for 29 legendary shards, and one pieces of armor for each class for 23 legendary shards. You get legendary shards from completing certain quests and events and mostly from dismantling legendary weapons and armor - don’t worry, over time, you’ll get a whole mess of these damn things. We’re like two months into the game on console and I’ve got over 1k legendary shards, and I don’t play this game no where near as much as I played Destiny 1. 

Anyways, sometimes Xur will have some really powerful stuff, sometimes he’ll have garbage. This week he’s in the Giant’s Scar on Io, and he has:

The sniper rifle, D.A.R.C.I. - I don’t really know too much about this weapon, as I don’t have one yet. But I know in the current PVE content, sniper rifles aren’t really that useful. I’d pass on this thing in favor of using your exotic slot for something like Mida, Sunshot, maybe Riskrunner, Merciless is awesome if you got one of those to drop, Wardcliff Coil, etc. One thing to consider when picking exotics is you can only equip one exotic piece of armor and one exotic weapon, so you need to decide what to spend your exotic slot on and weigh the pros/cons and having this weapon or armor equipped over that one. 

Titans, you have Actium War Rig. The exotic perk on these periodically reloads your equipped auto rifle, whether it’s in your power or energy slot. I discounted these at first, mostly because I thought auto rifles suck, in reality, they don’t. It’s worth trying out if you’ve got the shards, there are spots in the raid where you may be spending some time running away and having an automatic reload will help get you in the fight and keep you in the fight.  It’ll get you a few more shots in while shooting a boss as well.  I believe you can also pick this up as a quest reward while you’re doing the campaign.

Hunters have Knucklehead Radar. This thing keeps your radar up when aiming down sights with all weapons. Probably a PVP buy for the most part. Remember how I said to consider that you can only equip one piece of exotic armor?  You have to consider its strength and weaknesses, and for PVE, I’m not using this over the subclass specific exotics for hunters if I have them. Buy this though if you play a lot of PVP and you’re a radar whore. 

Warlocks, you get Eye of Another World. The exotic perk reduces the cool down of your grenade, melee and rift. In reality, it knocks maybe two seconds off your cool downs, not really worth it IMO. There are other, more powerful warlock exotics that are preferable to this. You can get this as a quest reward as well while doing the campaign, so don’t worry about buying it. 

Kind of a ho hum week for Xur, nothing is really a must buy. 

Thank you for that explanation - that helps a lot.  Could someone explain how the Vault works?  I had a gold (yellow) item I dropped in the vault because I wasn't using it and I don't see a way to put it back in my inventory.  I'm not getting the vault if its not a shared bank tool.

The vault is a place to store your extra stuff in Destiny. You can access the vault in a social space, like the farm. Look for a thing that looks like an ATM and you’ll get an option to access your vault.  

You can only only hold a finite amount of items in your inventory, so the vault gives you someplace to store your extra junk - and in this game, you will get *a lot* of extra shit. This is where an inventory manager app comes into play as well, like Destiny Item Manager or the Ishtar Commander. Both of these apps are written to interface with Bungie’s API, which allows you to move stuff from your vault to your character or vice versa, and to move items around between characters without having to visit a social space. 

Also, item quality goes like this:

White - common, low tier junk
Green - uncommon, still low tier junk
Blue - rare quality. Drops at a max of 300 power and you can apply a mod to take it to 305, the current power cap. 
Purple - legendary, capable of dropping at 300 power and will accept +5 power mods as wel
Gold - exotic, capable of dropping at max power of 305. These will already have a +5 power mod applied, and you can only equip one piece of exotic armor and one exotic weapon at a time. 

Thanks - that lines up pretty well with what I was expecting, but as mentioned I couldn't figure out how to take an item from my vault and put it back on a character.  I grabbed the Ishtar app and was able to do it easily from my phone, so that's a great pro tip to use those apps.

More questions - how do you add mods, can you only use a mod once (i.e. once attached, it is "used up" and can't be used elsewhere), and same question for custom colors - are they one use each?  I'm assuming "yes" to both, since you get them in quantities and that would seem pointless if they have unlimited re-uses.

Cool, thanks. My glimmer counter has stopped at 99999+.  Is it still counting or should I spend some?

I’ll probably be on sometime this afternoon to start my Destiny 2 PC experience. I preordered the game and season pass, canceled, then after reading the last TWAB, I bought the tandard game minus DLCs. I’ll pick up the DLCs if/when things start shaping up like they should with the game. 

The warlock jump takes some getting used to. 

With the warlock jump, you double tap to start the initial jump and to gain height, then you brake yourself on decent by tapping jump.  Warlocks are a little annoying because they lack vertical or horizontal speed in their jumps, so it can be a little frustrating and disorienting at times to move smartly around.  

Burst glide is probably the most balanced of the warlock jump/glides, and it still takes getting used to, especially if you're new to warlocks and/or new to Destiny in general and its movement.  Instead of making one big jump, try making several smaller jumps across gaps and to platforms to get used to how the movement works.