I was in your shoes exactly a week ago so let me give you my experience. First of all, old gear is no longer a factor but don’t just dismantle it. Go to the recalibration system. They’ve added a new system where you can pull stats and talents from gear to have it permanently stored and ready to use on any gear of the same type, as many times as you want. So dump all your old gear there and most of the new gear you get that you don’t use.
Second, finish the warlords campaign asap because the new endgame revolves around XP as much as loot. So don’t waste xp doing side work or grinds that you could do after you finish the campaign.
Third there is a new raid type level in New York called The Summit. You get to choose what targeted loot spawns there making grinding so much easier
Fourth, they’ve added a global difficulty setting from the map. So if you change the global difficulty to challenging you would only ever get gold drops or better (except from non-comb...