no, but the more the better. i'll buy it all day one. i've already run out of things to do besides level up things to kill crota faster. i can't level up my 36 light gear without shards, and you can only get those from the raid which you can do once a week, unless you have an alt character (which i'm working on). i still don't know how ppl hit 32 already, it takes like 21 shards to level one piece of armor up, and you need to level up at least 3. i've only gotten like 4-5 shards from the raid each week...
no point in doing the first raid other than to get gjallarhorn, and even then it's only going to max at 300 dmg. and i already have a 331 rocket launcher so there's no incentive to do that really, i just do the venus raid to get ascendant shards at this point. so basically, until they let me raid more than once a week, i can't really progress other than upgrading existing guns (which i have p much most of my stuff upgraded already besides exotics i'm prob not gonna use)
crota cheese is simple. one person hops into a new game at the crota checkpoint, another person joins them and brings their fireteam. clear the enemies that spawn initially after starting the crota fight. fireteam that joined takes out crota until he kneels, then the guy who made the game at the crota checkpoint pulls the lan cable and crota remains kneeled for the remainder of the fight. everyone waits til that person gets back online. then that person joins back into the game. at that point you just do the normal method to attack him and you can kill him really easily since p much no more enemies spawn besides the knights in the towers.
people will say it's cheap. until people start accepting my invites to do crota, or stop leaving after two failed attempts, it's the only way to get it done reasonably.
i really just want them to up the level cap or something at this point. can't see any incentive to play more than a few hours a week now, but when that dlc came out i was playing every free second i had