Why do i only get guantlets on the raid?

Why do you need mass massages to get raids going?

You can get to 29 and some change with 3 legendaries and an exotic, but to get to 30 you need to replace those legendaries with raid armor.

Go ahead and spend the shards on your current gear to get to 29. You'll get plenty of shards in the raid and being 29 will help, especially for hard mode. Hard raid is the only way to get the raid helmet, by the way. Start doing the raid as soon as you can,
though. I've been raiding three times a week and still only have the gloves. It can take a while to get the full set if you're as unlucky as I am.

The only thing that got me the slightest bit interested is I can supposedly hit the max rank without raiding now? That's pretty much why I stopped, could never get into a raid group and couldn't really progress any further which killed the game for me.

A raid by yourself? Zone are you thinking of a strike? The only raid in Destiny atm is the Vault of Glass and it is literally impossible to do it by yourself. You need 3+ people just to get in.

I think there were a few lfg sites for raids. I just never bothered with them. IMO the raids were just long enough to be a PITA considering what you got from them... that eventually wasn't worth getting after the next update came along.

Don't know why you'd quit at 20 just because of that. It wasn't impossible to find groups. Maybe a bit more effort to look on the web, in which case it wouldn't be much different than having a hub. Only difference is you'd have to use 2 devices to put it
together.

Even at that, I only found that I needed 1 or 2 other friends when I did want to go after some raid gear. Between myself, them and people on their lists, we could get a group together. When the Crota DLC came out, I had 2 or 3 friends that would start running
that raid and do it back to back, over several characters, and do it 2 or 3 times each character just to get practice for when 'reset' day came... so they could get it done really quick to get more chances at gear. They'd spam me to join. I got tired of it
TBH. Felt like that's all I was doing was the raid... and you only got the really good stuff the first time after reset.