Wandering around the Tower, I noticed a few players and interacted w/them to see their characters. All of them had (compared to me) seriously high defenses (+1100) and exotic weapons. I'm at level 18 and am nowhere near these players (defense: 377). The majority of my time is spent in the single player campaign, a handful of deathmatches, and just started doing Raids. How do you get like these players?

thx

The first thing to do is to get up to level 20. i'm sure you've heard this before, but many of the games systems don't even come into play until you max out your normal experience. Once you do that, you will have access to more rare equipment as well as legendaries and exotics. The boosts this equipment gives you are exponentially greater than the pre-level 20 equipment you have seen. You do need to upgrade that equipment to fully max it out, but even the early levels of it will be a big jump. The game does change significantly once you hit 20, so just grind out those last couple levels and see how it goes from there.

^ What redwing42 said.

I think the easiest way is to max out vanguard reputation and try to stock up on vanguard marks because the armor you can get from your vanguard is already maxed out and just needs to be ascended. The best way to get rep is by doing the daily bounties. The best way to get marks is from doing public events or by running strike playlists / Prison of Elders. Low level strike playlists or public events are your best bet until you get some lucky drops on gear or earn enough marks to buy some vanguard gear and get closer to about level 28. Strikes seem to drop gear more often than PoE.

Once you're between 28-30, if you still don't have any exotics then it's probably better to hit up the level 28 Prison of Elders because it seems to drop motes and strange coins more often which you can use to buy exotic gear from Xur when he is around Friday-Sunday. Aside from that, you should also have a key that you can use at the end of the level 28 PoE if you finished all of the house of wolves story missions and I *think* that is a guaranteed exotic weapon but I could be wrong.