You can only join Nightfalls from lvl25 or 26 onwards.

I was pretty surprised at how quickly I was able to level up to 20 with my second character. If you can get some higher level players to play with you, then you can tackle the higher difficulty story missions for bonus XP. Plus now you can carry a ton of bounties to level up quickly.

I started a Hunter about a week ago. After 8 hours and 15 minutes she hit 20, and then immediately went to 21 when I decoded the engrams I had stashed for her.

That was all solo play too, with the exception of a couple strikes of course.

I had banked a few low level uncommon weapons that I was able to use almost immediately, so that helped me breeze through the first few missions. I also got in the habit of playing with my warlock to suck up rare and legendary engrams, and then dumping them into the vault so my hunter could decode them. At level 10 I had a full set of rare gear.

I did vangaurd bounties religiously and made sure to play all content at the highest level I could without exceeding my character level to maximize xp.

I would actually be more like level 25 or so if the Cryptarch wasn't such an ever-loving bastard. I decoded two legendary gauntlet engrams, a legendary helmet engram, a legendary class item engram and three legendary boot engrams. I ended up with ascendant materials, a pair of gloves for a warlock, and three pairs of legendary hunter boots. (it's something!) I also rolled the dice and decoded an exotic helmet engram that my warlock bought from xur but that turned into a titan helmet. Guess I know what my next character will be.

rahool is such a dick.