Tips to level up Light and prepare for King's Fall raid | Destiny

Levels and light have been redesigned in Destiny: The Taken King. Most stuff isn’t gated behind your character’s level now, but the Light level instead. The upcoming raid, King’s Fall, has a recommended Light level of 280. In this guide, we’re going to show you how to get your Light level up to 290 and beyond, so you can enjoy the new content.

How to level up and hit 290+ Light in Destiny: The Taken King

Your Light score is the average of the attack and defense values of all your equipped gear. In turn, it affects the damage and defense of your character, as well as the stats of the items you get. The way to increase it is by equipping better weapons, armor, marks and even ghosts.

• Quests give out nice rewards – don’t shy away from doing them. Prioritize the ones that offer Legendary Marks as rewards.
• Doing the gunsmith rank 2 quest will reward you with a 280 attack weapon.
• Equip green and blue items instead of your regular gear if they give you a higher light score.
• When turning in quests and decrypting engrams, make sure your light level is as high as possible. It affects the quality of items you’ll receive.
• Decrypt engrams one by one and inspect the items in between. If you get a higher light level item, equipping it will improve your rewards on subsequent engrams.
• Dismantle legendaries. Dismantling a regular one will give you 3 legendary marks, while the leveled (with experience) version gives 5.
• Steer clear of vendor gear for now.
• Buy the Three of Coins from Xur – it increases the chances of exotic drops.
• Equipping a legendary sword would give you a sink for infusing worse heavy weapons into.
• If you feel you should spend some marks at the vendors’, go for a better ghost shell, since all your characters can use it.
• Hold off on buying legendary engrams from the Cryptarch. It’s simply not worth the risk right now.
• Use class specific items for infusing your gear. If you’re playing a Warlock and find an amazing Titan helmet, you can infuse your helmet with it and increase it’s defense rating, which increases your light level.
• You could use Motes of Light to get faction rep, and end up with a legendary from the faction package.
• Nightfall and Heroic strikes might be too hard for you right now, but it’s worth taking a chance, especially if you have a team.
• If you’re willing to break a sweat, do level 36 strikes until your light is up to 260, then graduate over to heroics.
• Finish the Never Ending Battle quest line – it unlocks the Nightfall. When you hit 280, try the Nightfall – you’ll be rewarded with a 300 attack weapon.
• Once you’ve gotten your first character over 280-290, move the weapons to the second one – it will make things a lot easier.

Big thanks to Rook7425 and the rest of the reddit community for the great tips.