Ie play the game.

Above is true; but if you want to focus:
Do bounties and and other activities that reward reputation - your first step should be to keep increasing your faction reputation. If you've got an exotic faction class item, make sure you're wearing it. Save exotic engrams and the nightfall for later after you've hit 388 or so.

Faction class rewards will go up to 390 light, so you want to leverage those rank-ups first to get your light level up to 388 or so. If you've stockpiled motes of light, strange coins, armor and weapon parts, ammo synths, you can use them to buy reputation. Faction packages will contain armor or weapons (your choice), and may also include ghosts. In order to get light-leveled artifacts and ghosts, run Archons Forge. Those drop up to 400 in the forge, and the drop rate is pretty good - go into the Forge every few light levels to make sure you keep your ghost and artifact level current.

After 390, the only ways to get light-leveled gear are to decode exotic engrams (so buy and use a lot of Three of Coins), the nightfall (one drop per character per week), the heroic Wrath of the Machine Strike (random drops at checkpoints after entering), Strike Chests, and Archons Forge (class items and artifacts only).

Strike Reward chests require a skeleton key to open, so you'll need to run strikes until one drops, and then you can run a specific strike to open its chest. Strike chests usually have a 50/50 chance between two items to drop, and might also reward a class item or artifact. You can get primary, secondary, heavy weapons from strike chests, and helmets and gauntlets. You can look up online which strikes can reward which items. You can't get light-leveled chests or boots from strike chests, so you'll need to use exotic engrams for those (or get lucky with the nightfall or raid) to bring those up. The Heroic Vosiks Part 2 checkpoint in WotM can drop Boots, and the Heroic Siege engine can drop Chest pieces and gauntlets.

Yeah, I guess I was wondering if that is still accurate. If so looks like I need to grind that faction rep, play crucible, & get some people to run nightfall & hard mode raid with me in order to get drops much higher than what I already have.

I'd help with Nightfall, but I doubt you can get on early enough before the 9 EDT raid.

Don't know how long VoG will take, but if you're on when we're done, and it's not too late, I'd enjoy doing that.

Yeah, I'm usually on around 10:30 EDT.