I've been doing the opposite. (Also, dumb thing v2) (Destiny)

by DiscipleN2k , Edmond, OK, Thursday, September 27, 2018, 12:39 (2057 days ago) @ bluerunner

One thing I found (and I think a guide has been posted) is to do the nightfall and Dreaming City powerful engram first. They give the biggest boosts. Then do the rest to fill in the gaps on lower level pieces. I did that this week and got a bigger boost than the previous weeks.

I'll do the less powerful powerful rewards first to try to bring my lower light stuff up to my character's average power level. Then I'll chase the rarer more powerful powerful engrams to give one of the slots a pretty good bump in power.

When I'm chasing the smaller rewards, if I'm 560 and my +1 powerful reward happens to drop for the slot I've already got a piece of 565 gear in, it's not a huge loss, but if it drops for one of those two slots where I've been dragging a piece of 552 gear forever, then it's now a 561 and makes a decent improvement in my overall light level.

On the other hand, if I grab a +5 engram and it decrypts to that slot with a bit of 565 gear, I've completely wasted that +5 bonus, and those get more and more rare as your power level increases. But as long as I can work it so I don't cash in the +5 rewards until my highest power item is at most three points higher than my character's power level, then I'm guaranteed to get a bump in power level no matter which slot it decrypts to.

Speaking of the ridiculous hoops that we have to jump through to try and maximize leveling efficiency, Robot Chickens took the original Google Docs spreadsheet, cleaned it up and made it look WAY nicer, added a deviation stat to show the maximum difference in either direction between your gear and power level, and added additional pages showing the expected power level changes for T1 (+1) and T2 (+5) rewards. We also changed the recommendation formula to look at "push" (how much your highest level item is above your power level) instead of "drag" (how much your lowest level item is below your power level) and added some back-of-the-napkin calculations for how likely you are to benefit from each engram.

Dumb Thing V2

-Disciple