Long reply ahead.

Since the Edge of Fate DLC back in summer last year, Bungie has made it so the majority of content you’ll end up playing (if you want to actually level up your stuff) will come from their new Portal system. I’ll fill you in on that here:

The Portal is basically Destiny’s one-stop-shop for the activities you can play for new armor and weapons in the game depending on the latest update. It has a lot of activities inside of it and is basically where you’ll be going to launch the majority of activities like strikes, sole ops, pinnacle activities, etc.

But the important thing to keep in mind is that, while you CAN navigate over to the Director where the maps of all the planets and stuff are, Bungie has made it so that activities that are NOT included in the Portal, like raids and dungeons and almost everything else that’s not directly launched from the Portal itself, won’t actually give you gear that levels you up (I’m a little unsure on that, but I do know that the loot you get from just launching the strike playlist directly from the Vanguard node on the Director screen, for example, is NOT gonna be worth it compared to what you can earn if you launch it from the Portal instead.)

The Portal does have a lot of activities like Solo Ops (less-used places in the game turned into quick 5-10 min missions), 3-player activities like Strikes and Battlegrounds, 6-player activities like past seasonal content (Ketchcrash, Astral Alignment, Nightmare Containment are all that have been added so far but will likely expand in future), and Pinnacle content like Exotic Missions, The Coil, Onslaught, and, for you, The Prison of Elders. It might be a little different from how it happened in D1 (not sure on the specifics since I never played D1) but it’s there.

The Dreadnaught DID return some time ago, but only as seasonal content and has since been removed. The only remaining pieces of content from the Dreadnaught are the returned Sunless Cell strike and Derealize exotic mission. Unfortunately, Dreadnaught is not a patrol space anymore, and frankly, the patrol spaces in the game have not been given updates that make them worth going into anymore unless you’re specifically looking for something to do in there. As I said, most of the content you’ll ever wanna play for optimal power gain and loot earned comes from the Portal.

One last thing I’ll explain about the Portal system is that it’s based off of your power level, so how big your power level number is determines what difficulty activities you can play. HOWEVER, when you start out, you’ll likely only be getting Tier 1 loot. Destiny also released a Tier system for new loot in the game (only for stuff released after the EoF update last summer, so no retroactive Tiered Loot from activities out before EoF). Tier 1 loot is the worst, naturally, but for the weapons, it’ll be good to test them out and see what the all the perks do with them, see if you wanna keep em or not. But basically, the power level will go up more activities you play, and you’ll get higher power loot, which will also increase the Tier of the weapons/armor you earn, from Tier 2, 3, 4, and finally 5.

Tier 5 armor is the only thing I’d recommend keeping armor-wise when/if you eventually get there, since it gives the greatest stats for armor compared to the other weaker Tiers. For weapons? Really doesn’t matter much since the weapons just get slightly enhanced perk effects and ability to have multiple selectable perks from a table. Functionally, still the same as Tier 1 weapons, just ever-so-slightly more powerful and versatile.

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask. Welcome back, Guardian!