What does it take to destroy a wight? Obviously fire does the job, but when Jon Snow’s team is hacking away at them with conventional weapons, does it have any impact? It also seemed that dragonglass isn’t an immediate wight stopper.

In the books, dragonglass has no special properties when it comes to wights – Sam tries to use his dragonglass dagger on the zombiefied Small Paul (pour one out) and the dagger does nothing.

Other than fire, total dismemberment is the only other method known to work. Basically if you damage the thing so badly that it cannot move, it’ll die (again).

Edit:

While I understand the show simplifying things, I do feel something was lost in the change b/c it seems to me that the white walkers created the wights in part because they don’t share their weaknesses to dragonglass (and presumably to valyrian steel too?), so they can send them in as arrow fodder while staying safe themselves.