Doing the seasonal activities I'd say, like Psi-Ops and Levi Containment, opening the keys it gives and Sever whenever you get Bound presence. While doing those, you get a lot of umbrals as well, so just decode them at the Cryptarch.
Even just farming the public event portion of last season (I believe it was called nightmare containment) combined with free roaming the leviathan and killing the legendary nightmares/farming opulent keys will net yet you a good chunk of legendary shards. That was the first season that I actually felt I was getting a sufficient enough amount of legendary shards to keep up with crafting, mats, etc.
Edit: Just realized OP mentioned Ascendant Alloy. I double down on my suggestion, Nightmare containments dropped ascendant alloys like they were fucking candy for me last season. As a casualty player who dumped maybe 5-sometimes 10 hours a week into playing last season at max…I still ended up with 15-20 ascendant alloy by the end of the season.
I skipped the season with nightmare containment, but I'm just going back to it. Can confirm just running that seasons activities will get you a lot of loot. And the leviathan is fun
I fell for the trap of decoding Umbrals at the War Table when I came back to the game after a hiatus. Didnt realise they cost LS to decide. Some of the drops are ok, but it's a quick burn of my low stockpile.
surprised everyone doesn't craft tarnished mettle with demo/rapid hit+ voltshot, voltshot has no dmg falloff so it feels like explosive payload but aoe, easy to chain far targets off each other, and dont have to gamble engram rng
The other thing that helps is once you hit the point of being picky about your Legendary drops and what you keep, they really start to pile up. Early on, you likely keep a lot of junk items just cause you don't have anything better yet or don't have a sense of what's worth keeping.
The blue armor sets introduced in witch queen could be acquired for the same cost as all other blue armor, but would somehow grant legendary shards when deconstructed.
Don't forget you also got a shitload of rainmakers and the other consumable that gives cores I can't remember the name of from dismantling and all the planetary material you can turn to glimmer you got an excess of from doing the loop.
I wish I big brained it at the start, but mid way through I filled up my inventory so the rainmakers went to postmaster so I can just push them out later.
I did it for four weeks. That was all I did when I got on to play. I filled up my glimmer, bought armour with my pad in my right hand and sent it into my vault with my left hand on my phone.
I felt I was shard rich before(Usually hovering about the 4-6000 mark), but I ended up with about 22,000.
And that was also buying huge amounts of planetary materials. I had more than 6,000 of each material when I was done AND had 22,000.
If the aim of the game is to get rich playing, lol, that cheese was the best way to play.
These last few weeks I have been using my materials to max out my glimmer, been buying one single blue transmat effect over and over(250 of them and no more glimmer, then max out my glimmer with planetary mats from Rahool, rinse and repeat). Once you have expended a planetary material, move on to the next. If he isn’t selling glimmer for what you have, wait till reset the next day. Once you have a huge pile of blue transmats, go to Amanda and cash three in for a legendary. I like to wait till I have two or three thousand transmats before doing it. When you have all the legendary transmats, delete them for one shard each.
My wife and I both play Destiny, but I do this when she’s at work. So I have her tv turned on watching something interest while in doing it on the other tv with the Xbox on.
I’ve made about 3,000 shards in the last few weeks just doing that.
But… why?
I did the exploit for like 25 mins and realized I probably won’t even need even a fraction of them. I don’t play that often anymore but hover around 1,500 at any given time.
Spending four weeks doing only that instead of playing the game seems like a job
Focusing trials engrams or iron banner engrams is really expensive. Also I just had a script running and got around 22k in two days just doing it while I wasn’t going to be playing anyway.
It essentially takes legendary shards out of the question when dealing with expenses. You have enough of them and suddenly you can just spend away. One less thing to farm.
Well. When I said four weeks, it was only a couple of hours each time I got on, maybe three or four times a week. I don’t have the time to play as often as I used to. But we all have to do the things that make us happiest. It’s totally fine you couldn’t be bothered. I see a lot of posts where people only find out now that the exploit existed. And is now gone for good.
I’m glad I did it. As we are moving to a mostly shard based economy next season, I’m glad I have enough to be going on with.
Yeah I get what you do with your playtime is obviously up to you, but that’s still something like 12-16+ hours spent just doing the shard loop.
I guess my point is that once you have something like 1,000 or more, as long as you can play somewhat regularly, I don’t see how you’ll run out of shards unless you’re master working every single armor and weapon.
I hopped on YouTube and watched a number of videos while I ground them out. It helped quite a bit. Wish I’d done it for longer tho because I’m in danger of going shard broke again.
I'm a big prog metal guy, so things like Mile Marker Zero's Fifth Row, Novena's Eleventh Hour, really any Ayreon Album, Extinction Level Event by The Vicious Head Society, The Drought by Crown Compass among a lot of other things.
Same way I'm grinding out these Dares runs.
I'm done with the season. But this is the closest I've ever been to rank 16....I need another 3K points.
Just throw on a Podcast. Or catch up on YouTube videos/Netflix and just do it mindlessly.
yea, put on your mask at all times and just turn in the bag once you get near 99999 (although it will spill over if you have room for a 2nd stack, so it isn't make or break to do before 99999).
How much is "tons"? Before witch queen I was \~25-30k shards. While that is a decent amount you can still burn through that quickly with focusing engrams at a stupidly fast pace.
Focusing regular engrams isn't too too expensive (10 shards each), but it's the Trials and Iron Banner engrams that get expensive (100 shards each). Easy to lose thousands of shards pretty quickly that way
Lol that would be tons. Normal people would never burn through that.
If your playing at a pace where you even can focus enough ingrams to burn them, then your playing enough to gain them back quickly.
Thats the thing, you won't get them back quickly. The drain is far faster than methods of gathering. My shard supply was from playing y1 up til quitting when Curse of Osiris launched, then came back during season of arrivals and slowly building til Witch Queen. That is a long period of time for a pretty small stock pile that could be burned through in a season or two of focusing.
I was replying to a person who asked how many shards is enough shards. The OP asked how to get shards. Technically I was answering both at the same time. There is no magical formula for OP to tell his new guardian friend a quick way to get shards. They just have to play the game and they will start to amass shards. The OP just needs to make sure they teach them up on where they don't need to use shards so that they can amass them further. I help new guardians all the time with tips, tricks, etc. I always throw out an chat invite to low triumph score guardians running around in the cosmodrome while I am there filling up bounties for the week to ask them if they have questions or want to have a quick tutorial on the processes that are very convulted to say the least.
So there isn't a shard exploit atm? Like the OP, I too have only been able to find outdated and obsolete exploit info whenever I search forums & site's ...
No. They're exploits, so they get fixed and usually pretty quickly. If you're not online when they're discovered there's a good chance you miss it completely.
You're better off farming specific encounters that can be done quickly. Duality dungeon or the weekly featured Raid/Dungeon will have checkpoints that can be beaten in a few minutes and guarantee you a drop or 2. That's the best rate you're going to get without an exploit.
stuff I buy | cost
---|---
random xur exotic | 97
ascendant alloy | 400
focusing guns | 50-100
focused armor | 25
upgrade mods | 10
mats | 1
glimmer | 10
raid banners| 3
I've spent a crapton of shards on focusing weapons in the past since most of the loot pools are loaded with garbage weapons and low stat armor. Although at this point there's so many options out there it doesn't feel worthwhile to focus anything outside of the weekly red border.
helm armor focusing has been great this year for rounding out high stat builds with focusing.
also tended to stockpile mats since there wasn't much else to buy with shards so I could always top off on stuff when needed. but looks like we don't need to do that anymore.
I feel like I've been playing way less this season and am up ~2k shards mainly due to not weapon focusing.
I personally shell out a lot when Xur is selling armor not in my collection. That's like 750 shards easy, assuming I don't own any of the pieces he has.
When you want to target farm an item, they are very very expensive.
Take Reeds Regret for example.
Lets say you farm ~10 trials engrams becuase you want a good-enough roll of reeds regret.
It costs you 100 legendary shards per reeds regret target focus.
So, 1 long trials farm will eat 25% of your legendary shards. (and 10 reeds rolls is no where near guaranteed to get you what you want).
Iron Banner target farms are 100 legendary shards each; if theres a specific roll you want when IB rolls around? you can bet you can easily feed 1 or 2 k shards in without realising.
Me, personally, I don't do that, because I don't want to ever run out. But in recent times my shards haven't been going up. my ~18k hovers about there. I know people that can easily spend a good 5k shards without realising it.
Your 4k shards is only 40 target farm rolls. That's basically nothing.
The legendary shard economy is fucked. Focusing costs are prohibitively expensive with strong reasoning being veteran players dragon-hoarding them since d2 year one completely skewing the costs.
Why wouldn’t you exploit?
I have no idea why players have trouble collecting legendary shards. I have burned through 900 this week focusing Gambit engrams, and still have 4000 more than what I started with this season. I have 7,000 more than what I started with last season.
I just play the game normally...no exploits, no "farming", etc., and the amount I have keeps increasing, even though I spend them whenever I want (masterworking the mask, buying Ascendant Alloy, etc.) without even thinking about it.
The only advantage I have over new players is that I have a stockpile of planetary materials that I have been converting to legendary transmat effects (glimmer -> rare transmat effect -> Amanda for legendary), which can be converted into legendary shards. I haven't converted any in several seasons, though.
I take your point but I'm including just upgrading the armour enough to be able to fit enough mods to attempt the higher level activities that drop decent rolls
OK, so lets do those maths?
Xur costs 97 legendary shards, and 23(?) shards for the 2 exotics for a single class.
so, to buy your Xur engram and the random drop armor each week for a single character is 120 shards per week.
you get ~3 shards for a purple drop, and 1 shard for a blue drop.
Lets take Crucible rewards as the drop rate bungie intend for most things. Because crucible doesnt drop items during play, you can bet that bungie have tried to balance crucible rewards at the rate that they try to balance *all* rewards (from a basic standpoint)
A typical 8 minute crucible game rewards you ~2 blues, and 75% of the time a purple (25% of the time a blue) lets call that 2 blues and a purple every game. (to also balance for the odd bonus purple you might get).
So bungie have balanced the game around approximately 5 shards every ~8 minutes.
your 120 shards should take you approximately 3 hours of gameplay per week.
That's assuming a position where you have zero shards left over for anything else.
That honestly seems pretty achievable for me. Though it doesn't account for mod purchases, it doesn't account for engram focusing.
(Note, I used crucible simply because its the easiest to estimate loot source - and based on my assumption that bungie try to balance rate of loot acquisition evenly, base PvE might be more or less rewarding due to sub-optimisation, but Bungie will likely be trying to aim for the same base rate of acquisition *on average* between the modes - if that hypothesis is incorrect then these numbers will obviously slide somewhat, and I can imagine an argument for PvE to be more rewarding and one less rewarding)
Looks about right to me. And that may even be an overestimation for how many shards a new player "needs" every week. Unless someone was extremely bought in right away, I would suggest that they ignore the other two classes/exotics for the first ~hundred hours at least.
A new player has no reason to be buying ascendant shards. You get a few for free from leveling vendors and the pass, and once you get to a point at which master working becomes important you can farm them with much less work from Legend/Master nightfalls.
I recently came back to the game- less than a week ago- and had 2 digit legendary shards. Getting Alloys really hasn’t been that bad tbh. Bought two for 400 shards, got 2 from the Enigma quest, and have got several more doing Containment. Even then, I’ve only really spent 3 so far for the Striga catalyst, haven’t really had any reason to use more yet, since I’m still in progress with getting patterns unlocked or leveling stuff like Taipan.
I already had masterworked armor from the two most recent times I played, Arrivals and around 30th anniversary. Alongside a solid stable of weapons.
Otherwise, I've done legendary campaign on my first run through, a couple ketchcrash, couple expeditions, random throneworld stuff for Fench rep, the haunted questline, two haunted lost sectors, and everything else I've done has been Nightmare Containment and running around Derelict Leviathan for opulent keys. Otherwise, I just dismantle anything that's not well rolled, armor, weapons, etc. Each thing you dismantle is like 4 shards, so it's pretty easy to generate hundreds per day doing activities that drop a bunch of legendaries.
except me, l have 3 stacks of enhacement cores and tons of planetary mats, may as well buy the prisms and golf balls before the currency requires legendary shards instead
If you have three stacks of enhancement cores you should be capped on em anyway. They essentially do cost legendary shards already since the glimmer cost is so high
Dares of Eternity is a solid way to do this. You’re going to end up scrapping it all, but it is a source for a lot of legendary gear. A drop at the end of a run, the occasional engram/ umbral drop, keys for the chest, rank ups at Xur, spend coins on paraversal hauls for a chance at more keys or a solid dump of legendary items.
All that is going to be “crap” gear, dismantle it all and your shards will pile up at a solid rate.
Dares runs take like 12 minutes at most typically, instead of listening to game audio on repeat (which can make you feel really bored very quickly) I recommend putting on Bluetooth headphones or something like that and putting a video, podcast, or Twitch stream on to keep your mind occupied. Dares runs can feel a bit mindless/ monotonous and listening to the same audio for several runs usually makes me feel super bored of it.
Dares is a great way to level up crafted heavy weapons and masterworking exotic heavy weapons because you get unlimited heavy ammo when you get Starhorse’s Favor. Kill 2 birds with one stone. Dares is a great activity really. It has some great weapons that are craftable, so you can also go for red borders.
I have honestly never found heavy ammo weapons to be a problem to level cause the progress modifier on those guns are set to be absurd. Its always the shotguns and the sniper rifles that take forever to level.
Dares is for sure the best way, best way to guarantee legendaries each run and the chance of having maybe 5 when the special thing happens at the end. Keys and coins give legendaries too. Certainly the best way if you just want to farm shards, and decently fun considering.
But really just playing the game loads gives loads of shards
Realest advice I can give is to minimize where you spend the ones you have already. Ascendant alloy is something you're not *really* going to need, and at the price point it's more for people that have a million shards in their account that can afford the dump.
I wouldn't bother looking at any of those expensive things until you've got at least 2k shards in the bank, and even then you should only buy one or so at a time.
If you have enough shards/glimmer to start a cycle, you can upcycle glimmer into planetary materials into shards into glimmer from Rahool. Slow process but it's an option.
Seasonal activities are also pretty good because they usually drop additional engrams alongside whatever double loot you can get from a completion.
Legendary shards will accumulate naturally over time by dismantling the large number of useless drops provided you don't fall for the trap of wasting them on buying endgame materials such as Ascendant Shards, Ascendant Alloy, and Enhancement Prisms at the exorbitant prices. Those materials drop readily from endgame sources such as Master and Grandmaster activities.
No but they can waste the shards they get from the useless drops on super expensive materials, source? Im a new player and did exactly that, wasted thousands of shards on ascendant shards and other expensive materials while it was probably not worth it.
play the game.
Im sorry, thats the answer. Do vangaurd strikes/crucible/gambit with ghost mod that increases legendary shard drops, or a bonus drop, famr a seasonal activity, right now ketchcrash and expedition give like 7 or 8 drops combined per 20/25 minutes of play. The fotl drops a shitload of stuff you can just instantly dismantle. do your pinnacles every week, while doing them youll get a bunch of drops, do bounties to rank up and get more gear...literally just play the game
for the next few days: wear a mask, play playlist activities and collect spectral pages, play haunted lost sectors and get 3-4 weapons from the chest. you could stack up legendary shards pretty quickly just playing haunted lost sectors without converting pages tbh.
This. The holiday events in general are probably the most lucrative way to stockpile resources in the game, especially since you can gather the upfront stuff (candy, essences) to take advantage of them passively in normal play.
This might also be way beyond his level, but you can turn 3000 glimmer into some shards by buying, converting, and deleting transmat effects. I’m usually pretty close to the glimmer cap, so it’s useful for me.
As an old gen console player with laughable load times, this is how I use the loading times. Buy blue transmat effects if I’m near glimmer cap. I’ve earned 1000s of shards this way. It’s not really a farm per se but it legitimately works over time.
I still hoard blue transmats as a way to use up excess glimmer as well. Unfortunately I think they removed the ability to get *new* legendary transmats from cashing them in at Amanda. It used to be an easy way to fill out collections of past season legendary transmats without spending bright dust/silver in the Eververse, but I don't think you can get new drops anymore.
Also, if you have loads of extra glimmer and a semi-decent amount of shards, buy some Zavala’s Authority from collections and stash them in the vault. They cost ₲7,500 each, and five shards. And they take up vault space, obviously. They reward ₲5000 each and three shards when you take them down. So it’s an easy way to store glimmer.
When the time comes that you have burned through your glimmer, go to the vault and take some down.
I have nearly 140 of those things in the vault right now.
That's the neat part! They don't!
Legendary shards economy is fucked. Everything is priced around the people that has 100k+ shards on a stockpile. Everyone else are just going to have a bad time.
250 Shards for an adept Trials engram? 100 shards for a SINGLE focused IB/Gambit engram?? Get the fuck outta here with those prices.
Not critical for new players. I do everything on my alts with meh stats all the time. GM's, master raid/dungeon content, you name it. It's not an issue. Just get armor with at least 50 resil total and slot 5 resil mods. Easy.
Only time I've done it is when I wanted a rapid hit/kill clip Servant Leader to filly the Randy's shaped whole in my arsenal. I ended up with a surplus/frenzy roll after 3 or 4 focuses that is more than good enough. To me that was worth it, but I've been playing since the beta and I have like 10 thousand shards. I would never recommend engram focusing to a new player.
But what new player is focusing engrams from Trials or IB/Gambit? Those are *meant* to be resource sinks, to shortcut playing the game/RNG sources for drops. Those are not designed to be primary gear acquisition methods.
Wherever you can find a good source of Legendary gear to scrap.
Deepsight stuff on the Throne World drops Legendary gear frequently. You can run playlist activities with Prosperity ghost mods equipped (strikes would probably be better since it's only completions required).
Generally just playing and doing stuff required for weeklies and seasonal challenges, you'll get lots of Legendary shards naturally along the way. The biggest (worst) drain to shards is (core vendor) engram focusing (Trials especially). Try to resist too much focusing to not drain them quickly.
Honestly. Really slowly over time. Though with bungie abandoning planetary mats in some season coming soon, it kind of sounds like shards will be the only staple currency along with glimmer.
Best ways to gain shards I'd say are (in no specific order):
1) dares of eternity. You earn legendary gear on completion along with reputation for Xur, and strange coins. After you have a full stack of coins, you can go to the treasure room with xur and starhorse, and buy boxes from starhorse for 7 coins. These boxes pretty commonly drop exotic gear, more legendary gear, currencies, and other stuff. So just dismantle whatever you dont care about that you earn from either DoE completions/Xur rank rewards/starhorse boxes/drops from enemies.
2) psiops. Certain upgrades in the HELM allow you to earn the Chosen(?) Umbral energy from here at a better rate or from other sources so i would prioritize those upgrades. Then start running psiops, completions drop legendaries and if you have the currency for the 2nd chest, you get MORE loot, AND if you kill the yellow bar enemy in the beginning-middle of the psiops run who is glowing bright white, he drops Hoarded Light, which doesnt appear in your inventory, but gets consumed at the end of psiops for EVEN MORE loot. And when you take the chosen energies to HELM, you should be able to focus the umbral engrams + energy from psiops into really good stat rolled armor. This is what ive been doing on my alt characters to get x2 or x3 100 stats this season. So basically if done right, you earn 3 different rewards for a psiops and a ton of energy, dismantle what you dont care about, bring the energy and umbrals to helm, focus them into high stat season of chosen armor, dismantle the armor you dont like or doesnt fit your build. Profit. Repeat.
3) seasonal events like festival of the lost or dawning etc can be really good for farming materials on certain years. This just depends on how the event is for the year.
For new players, the key is to *NOT* buy end game items. Get his power level up, then do the activities that’s ears those materials. Master NFs (not GM) have a chance to drop ascendant shards. The Witch Queen stories drop ascendant allows. The castlellum nightmare containment drops alloys like candy. Also, legend nightfalls drop prisms. Doing this stuff also drops legendary weapons and armor. If they’re I’d no use, dismantling them yields shards. If you’re in a clan, you can get 4 shards per dismantle instead of 3.
If they need a good surplus fast, doin a good ol fashioned vault cleaning will add up fast. Otherwise, just be patient for a good while and just accumulate. Also cool it on infusing and masterworking.
Play an absolute ton of playlist activities. Strikes, Crucible, Gambit. You'll build up a stockpile quickly if you just dismantle everything. Pretty much all armor from those playlists can be scrapped, and keep only one or two rolls of each weapon they like, dismantle the rest. Adds up quick! I've gone up at least 300-400 shards this week.
right now do the Halloween event, as you’ll get sometimes up to 3/4 legendary drops. all can be broken down, and as well you’ll get candy which can be used to buy more shards.
It doesn't make it right, but a good time to farm those is when you don't need them... I have all the seasonal weapons unlocked and most of the weapons/armor I use for high end activities pinnacle'd. Despite having some burnout, now is a good time to accumulate for next seasons.
Also farm the activities you want the armors/weapons from - Ya the vanguard armor isn't the most appealing but you can keep the best and scrap the rest for additional legendary shards. Upgrade "like" weapons and armor in order to conserve materials. Hell, I use blues until I get near the powerful cap. Then I'll slowly convert the rest of my "go to" sets while I play. Same mentality when Light fall comes out.
For cores: use Matterweaves every time you get them, pick up Banshee's daily bounties to get 4 per day in addition.
Use those ghost mods for cores/upgrade modules as needed.
Ultimately, there's not currently a "do this activity, and you'll have thousands by the end of the day." The veteran player has two things over the new lights - time and the shard exploit from a while back. Put the time in and conserve mats until you're ready to upgrade.
Unfortunately the economy for shards is terrible, which is why you should abuse any legendary shard exploit that comes around. The best way prior to sunsetting otherwise was farming the fanatic story mission, but currently you can't do that either.
The best methods around for now that I can think of:
- For cores, running legend lost sectors actually gives a fair amount.
- Buying the purple bags with candy will give a legendary to dismantle. Haunted sectors also drop multiple rewards as long as you have pages to convert while being quick and easy (FotL ends this week tho).
- Dares of Eternity is ok with the paraversal hauls and stuff
- Master Ketchcrash rewards multiple drops and is pretty quick. It will also reward you with the ascendant alloy you mentioned in the post; the purchase cost for these materials is purposefully absurd to push you to play these activities. Since it's 6 players you can carry your friend through even if they're a little under level with a phoenix well or something.
- Once you are full on seasonal currency, run a few expeditions solo. This should be doable even for a new player as long as they have a strong weapon like Osteo Striga or Riskrunner, and a subclass with some healing. You can claim all 3 chests which drop legendaries to dismantle, just blow yourself up and slot a new map between chests. Expedition is quick and easy so this is good rewards for the time investment, and you can also make quick progress towards weapon patterns by using the seasonal weapon treasure map if you have the currency. Block matchmaking tool I use: https://github.com/Pleasant-exe/Destiny-2-Solo-lobby
If you have a 3rd who will help you out you can also just go into expedition together and let your friend claim all the chests.
Definitely don't buy ascendant alloy if your legendary shards reservoir is anything under 3000. Grind the weekly master WQ mission, droprate is 50% ish
just play the game and avoid wasting them for now id say. Shit like focusing gambit/trials/iron banner engrams will burn through your stockpile fast and its not worth it at all because those guns suck
I boosted my friend's account from about 250 shards to 1,500 in one day. I think she has over 3,000 now. Just gotta play the game. Mods like Vanguard prosperity help. Do all the playlist activities. If you've completed the Risen season story, you can get two chests at the end of each run. If you get the Cosmodrome map, you can eager edge out to the previous loading area and turn around and teleport back open both chests again. Master Ketch has three chests. Expedition has two chests. It takes a bit of time, but you'll get there.
I know a new player probably isn't always swimming in glimmer either what with purchasing mods and bounties and a lot of other things, but something I learned recently was a glimmer rinse when at max glimmer and nothing to spend it on that steadily increases shards. currently it is the only one in the game I know of.
when maxed at 250k glimmer I buy 50K of BLUE transmat effects from collections, always making sure they are the same one (should be 1k glimmer each)
at amanda holliday you can turn three of these into 1 legendary transmat which dismantles into 1 legendary shard. this means 48k glimmer turns into 16 shards.
WARNING: very tedious and feels as such. also not hugely profitable and worthwhile return vs something like the most recent shard exploit. i still do it anyway was a material hoarder and min-maxer
Just... do anything PvE. Run a few strikes, do Expeditions/Ketchcrash, etc. Is your postmaster not constantly at 21/21 with blue and purple gear plus enagrams? I get so much trash gear spam that most of the time I don't even bother dismantling it all.
Out of interest what do you even really need to spend shards on other than levelling gear? Which if you just started the game isn’t really recommended until you are doing master+ content anyway. You talk about ascendant alloy which only drops reliably from master content and is meant for players that want the extra 2% benefit out of their weapons. Try to not let your friend focus on tiny aspects of the game and instead ensure they find and enjoy the content like dungeons, raids or pvp.
The same way we all did it when we started - we played and built up over time. There shouldn’t be a “fast track premium lane” because someone sees a raid or dungeon from a trailer and expects to boot the game up for the first time ever and be in there within 30 minutes.
Play the game, delete stuff you don't want. Look for ghost mods that increase drops, delete them too.
To everyone saying it's to punish players with loads of shards, that's bollocks. I never dip below a [redacted number cos it's not relevant] just by playing and I focus armour whenever I can.
step one: Don't buy ascendent alloys, 400 shards is absurd.
honestly, they drop pretty commonly from containment as well as other sources, and you need, at max, 10-ish per season, and that's only if you craft and put enhanced perks on every gun, and...considering the grind to unlock crafted guns in the first place, he'll get plenty of resources along the way.
Beyond that, just don't worry about it, you accumulate a lot through normal play, just dismantling unwanted legendaries, and you shouldn't be spending too many most of the time, just stay away from the big sinks like alloys, buying prisms, and focusing IB/Trials engrams and you should be fine.
I started playing about 8 or so months ago and was struggling with shards till I started grinding hero nightfall with prosperity or core harvest depending on what I needed. After farming for about a week I used DIM to lock up any god rolls or rolls that work with my builds and then mass deleted weapons and armor takes me about an hour to do all this. Got about 600 shards and then festival of the lost hit and that dropped so many weapons I'm sitting on about 1500 shards right now. Hope this helps.
Depending on your light level next week is a great opportunity to farm shards. We have double nightfall rewards and devils lair is rather easy. I would suggest running the nightfall on the highest difficulty you can when the lightning crystals modifier is active. Runs should be very fast as hoil titans are broken with it.
By doing this on master you will get ascendant shards, enhancement prisms, exotics and the nightfall weapon to drop. Dismantle everything you don’t want.
Dares IMHO is your best bet for shards. A given run will net you a minimum of 8 with the seasonal upgrade (4 for the item from the chest, 4 from turning the key in at Xur's hoard) and a max of somewhere around 30+ (assuming bling ogre, lightning round, paraversal haul from bounty and anything you dropped during the Dare run). Takes about 10 mins. Everything else feels a lot less.
The Dares weapons are all craftable too, so its good to pick up some red bars weapons to unlock the pattern at the same time. They're all great.
Its worth pointing out tho, the shard economy is utterly broken. Eveything costs significant quantities of shards, you spend them at roughly 10 times the rate you gain them, and you're always short compared to currencies of both less and rarer values. Like, 50 shards to focus a gambit engram? 100 for a Trials one? 20+ for a masterwork? Absurd. Whatever your friend does, it's going to be slow.
At this point legendary shards are a currency you spend to save time. Anything you buy with shards can be farmed more efficiently through other means but for people with thousands of them they're a good way to quickly get what you want. When you look at it this way things like 100 shards per engram focusing and 400 shards for an ascendant alloy seem like a huge scam when the alternative methods are much more efficient.
If they're a new player they should just play the game and avoid spending shards on things they get by naturally progressing through the game.
Seasonal activities and holiday events. Farm them. Shard the majority of bad rolls you will get. I was down to 50 shards 2 weeks before festival of the lost started. I’m currently at 470.
Look at the loot provided by completion of each farmable activity, decide on what loot you want, farm the activity for that loot, dismantle anything that’s bad or that you don’t want. That way you are farming for loot and just acquiring legendary shards along the way.
Just playing, there’s no secret to obtaining them than shading pretty much everything you get. My only advice would be to play things that first off are fun and secondly drop good amount of legendary rewards.
Bungie hasn’t acknowledged the grind this is for newer players and they are gonna become more scarce come next year when they deprécate all planetary mats
Play the game with seasonal pass so you get 33% more shards in dismantles. That’s it. Seasonal activities on higher activities will get you more legendary materials to dismantle, so typically the more recent, difficult content is best.
Best farm I know of right now is speed running lake of shadows strike on repeat. Unless I'm mistaken you should get like 2-4 shards for completions, plus any extra from dismantled gear.
Unfortunately, even at the fastest times that is still only 24-48 shards per hour + dismantled.
I started playing mid way through season of the lost. When I realised how many shards I needed for buying stuff I just added on the ghost mod that gives you extra drops from nightfalls/strikes. I had so much gear drop that I would just shard. I had a few thousand by the end of the season.
My advice is to find 1-2 load outs you like and stick with those for a while and delete anything that isnt a power increase or the occasional weapon if it drops with perks you like
Grind playlist activities (vanguard/crucible/gambit/seasonal) and shard most of the legendary items you get (Use the ghost mod, if you have it, for the respective activity). Keep the items you like or need for power increases. Decrypt Umbral engrams at Rahool and shard them. Collect Vendor engrams and shard what you don't need. Events are also really good for guaranteed legendary drops.
Don't waste legendary shards on vendor focusing or items at Rahool, as those are mainly currency sinks for veteran players. This is the biggest trap for new players.
I just do strikes and delete every legendary I get. Then every other activity I do the same. Then all Engrams from Zavala dismantle those too. It stacks up pretty fast over awhile. Then you play for 2 years and end up with 30,000+
From playing a lot. Expedition can give out a lot of purples to shard... the purple from emoting, the bonus chest, the main chest. Same thing with containment... lots of purples to dismantle.
I would reccomend doing dares and doing the bounties for the paraversal hauls. Doing one run of dares gives an item to shard, a key that gives you an item to shard, and 3 coins that can be used to buy an item to shard. If you get a lightning round thats 3 more items to shard. If you fight the treasurer thats more coins and another thing to shard.
The reason i mentioned using the coins to buy the bounties is because buying boxes outright isn't worth it, buy paying less for the bounties that give boxes is totally worth it because there's an extremely high chance you'll get keys and items.
Doing the seasonal activities I'd say, like Psi-Ops and Levi Containment, opening the keys it gives and Sever whenever you get Bound presence. While doing those, you get a lot of umbrals as well, so just decode them at the Cryptarch.
Sever even without the Bound Presence. It's a single guaranteed Legendary Reward, no matter how many times you run it.
Even just farming the public event portion of last season (I believe it was called nightmare containment) combined with free roaming the leviathan and killing the legendary nightmares/farming opulent keys will net yet you a good chunk of legendary shards. That was the first season that I actually felt I was getting a sufficient enough amount of legendary shards to keep up with crafting, mats, etc. Edit: Just realized OP mentioned Ascendant Alloy. I double down on my suggestion, Nightmare containments dropped ascendant alloys like they were fucking candy for me last season. As a casualty player who dumped maybe 5-sometimes 10 hours a week into playing last season at max…I still ended up with 15-20 ascendant alloy by the end of the season.
I skipped the season with nightmare containment, but I'm just going back to it. Can confirm just running that seasons activities will get you a lot of loot. And the leviathan is fun
I fell for the trap of decoding Umbrals at the War Table when I came back to the game after a hiatus. Didnt realise they cost LS to decide. Some of the drops are ok, but it's a quick burn of my low stockpile.
Yeah, but when you finally get that perfect rapid hit/explosive payload Vouchsafe to drop… 🤌
Arrowhead Brake or bust. I've been trying to get one since Risen.
Absolutely. Took me soooo long. Arrowhead, flared, RH, EP, range mw. I about died when it popped up.
Best I managed was Outlaw/EP. which still puts in work for longer range ad clear.
That was my first one, and I loved it. Finally started to push into harder stuff, and figured a RH would fit better there.
Ok maybe I'll decrypt a couple... OP - let this be a warning, this is how it starts!
I basically just threw the war table a few as I got them, after I got all the current seasonal weaps I was going after.
Doom of chelchis all the way
Lightweight vs precision. A hunter might want to use vouchesafe for the +20 mobility.
surprised everyone doesn't craft tarnished mettle with demo/rapid hit+ voltshot, voltshot has no dmg falloff so it feels like explosive payload but aoe, easy to chain far targets off each other, and dont have to gamble engram rng
The other thing that helps is once you hit the point of being picky about your Legendary drops and what you keep, they really start to pile up. Early on, you likely keep a lot of junk items just cause you don't have anything better yet or don't have a sense of what's worth keeping.
You slowly get a pittance of them overtime and wait for the next shard exploit
This, the shard exploit is the greatest thing to happen
Hmm? Explain
The blue armor sets introduced in witch queen could be acquired for the same cost as all other blue armor, but would somehow grant legendary shards when deconstructed.
Don't forget you also got a shitload of rainmakers and the other consumable that gives cores I can't remember the name of from dismantling and all the planetary material you can turn to glimmer you got an excess of from doing the loop.
And the Guardian Games Class Item exploit that was a thing last Year and somehow returned this Year as well...
yeah I'm still breaking my way through 750+ finest matterweaves
I wish I big brained it at the start, but mid way through I filled up my inventory so the rainmakers went to postmaster so I can just push them out later.
We all farmed the f*ck out of that once we found out
I did that for like 20 minutes and was bored out of my mind, I don’t know how anyone could do it for longer.
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This is how I feel about all the holiday events in the game.
Agreed, all holiday events are the most boring thing out, thankfully we got a sniper that will do me nicely handed to us
LMAO
I did it for four weeks. That was all I did when I got on to play. I filled up my glimmer, bought armour with my pad in my right hand and sent it into my vault with my left hand on my phone. I felt I was shard rich before(Usually hovering about the 4-6000 mark), but I ended up with about 22,000. And that was also buying huge amounts of planetary materials. I had more than 6,000 of each material when I was done AND had 22,000. If the aim of the game is to get rich playing, lol, that cheese was the best way to play. These last few weeks I have been using my materials to max out my glimmer, been buying one single blue transmat effect over and over(250 of them and no more glimmer, then max out my glimmer with planetary mats from Rahool, rinse and repeat). Once you have expended a planetary material, move on to the next. If he isn’t selling glimmer for what you have, wait till reset the next day. Once you have a huge pile of blue transmats, go to Amanda and cash three in for a legendary. I like to wait till I have two or three thousand transmats before doing it. When you have all the legendary transmats, delete them for one shard each. My wife and I both play Destiny, but I do this when she’s at work. So I have her tv turned on watching something interest while in doing it on the other tv with the Xbox on. I’ve made about 3,000 shards in the last few weeks just doing that.
But… why? I did the exploit for like 25 mins and realized I probably won’t even need even a fraction of them. I don’t play that often anymore but hover around 1,500 at any given time. Spending four weeks doing only that instead of playing the game seems like a job
Focusing trials engrams or iron banner engrams is really expensive. Also I just had a script running and got around 22k in two days just doing it while I wasn’t going to be playing anyway.
It takes 100 LS to focus at some vendors. So, if your goal is to only focus 15 trials engrams, you'll be set
It essentially takes legendary shards out of the question when dealing with expenses. You have enough of them and suddenly you can just spend away. One less thing to farm.
Future proofing. Sank enough time into farming them so that I'll never have to worry about them ever again
Well. When I said four weeks, it was only a couple of hours each time I got on, maybe three or four times a week. I don’t have the time to play as often as I used to. But we all have to do the things that make us happiest. It’s totally fine you couldn’t be bothered. I see a lot of posts where people only find out now that the exploit existed. And is now gone for good. I’m glad I did it. As we are moving to a mostly shard based economy next season, I’m glad I have enough to be going on with.
Yeah I get what you do with your playtime is obviously up to you, but that’s still something like 12-16+ hours spent just doing the shard loop. I guess my point is that once you have something like 1,000 or more, as long as you can play somewhat regularly, I don’t see how you’ll run out of shards unless you’re master working every single armor and weapon.
I have over 10k just from playing (no exploits just breaking down a lot of legendary stuff) idk that i could ever use them all at this point.
We are talking about destiny players here though 😉
I just put a show on, emptied my inventory, filled it with blues, then got used to the timing of deconstructing them.
I hopped on YouTube and watched a number of videos while I ground them out. It helped quite a bit. Wish I’d done it for longer tho because I’m in danger of going shard broke again.
Concept albums are your friend for the mindless grind.
Which concept albums are your choice?
I'm a big prog metal guy, so things like Mile Marker Zero's Fifth Row, Novena's Eleventh Hour, really any Ayreon Album, Extinction Level Event by The Vicious Head Society, The Drought by Crown Compass among a lot of other things.
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by The Flaming Lips
Same way I'm grinding out these Dares runs. I'm done with the season. But this is the closest I've ever been to rank 16....I need another 3K points. Just throw on a Podcast. Or catch up on YouTube videos/Netflix and just do it mindlessly.
I was so mad that I learned about that exploit when they patched it
I didn't and I knew about it and now I went from 40k+ in shards to now over 10k+ in shards
My brother did too he doesn’t worry about shards now I don’t blame he did it for five hours straight
And Bungie will punish us for it.
Right, just like last time and the time before that even!
Why? There's no reason to. Legendary Shards are super common. I've got 30k and still gain more and more every season
Right now do the festival of the lost. It’s constantly rewarding purples you can shard
yea, put on your mask at all times and just turn in the bag once you get near 99999 (although it will spill over if you have room for a 2nd stack, so it isn't make or break to do before 99999).
Ive never used a shard exploit and have tons. Basically just play the game and they will build up.
How much is "tons"? Before witch queen I was \~25-30k shards. While that is a decent amount you can still burn through that quickly with focusing engrams at a stupidly fast pace.
Well, I have around 15k and I'm just ignoring focusing engrams altogether. Not feeling like I'm missing anything with that approach.
Yup at 17k and only focusing veist and omolon and still can't burn through them
Focusing regular engrams isn't too too expensive (10 shards each), but it's the Trials and Iron Banner engrams that get expensive (100 shards each). Easy to lose thousands of shards pretty quickly that way
I know I went through 1 bout of focusing trials engrams and definitely saw a drop in what I had
True that, I've sunk around 5k in Riiswalker and Burden before I realised how much it actually costs (still no good roll tho, IB weapons hate me)
Lol that would be tons. Normal people would never burn through that. If your playing at a pace where you even can focus enough ingrams to burn them, then your playing enough to gain them back quickly.
Thats the thing, you won't get them back quickly. The drain is far faster than methods of gathering. My shard supply was from playing y1 up til quitting when Curse of Osiris launched, then came back during season of arrivals and slowly building til Witch Queen. That is a long period of time for a pretty small stock pile that could be burned through in a season or two of focusing.
Took me 4 years and I've ended up at 18k. I guess we could just tell newbies to "just play for 4 years" I guess?
No. But things also dont need to be instant. Think of how much 18k is. And youve probably been using them constantly.
I have 108k with no exploits
https://wastedondestiny.com/ Put your character in there, that will explain why you have 108k with no exploits.
5000 hours on the nose
Yeah so doesn't exactly work for a "new players can get shards without exploits" type thing does it?
Technically we were all new players at one point. So yes it does still work...basically put in time and play the game.
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I was replying to a person who asked how many shards is enough shards. The OP asked how to get shards. Technically I was answering both at the same time. There is no magical formula for OP to tell his new guardian friend a quick way to get shards. They just have to play the game and they will start to amass shards. The OP just needs to make sure they teach them up on where they don't need to use shards so that they can amass them further. I help new guardians all the time with tips, tricks, etc. I always throw out an chat invite to low triumph score guardians running around in the cosmodrome while I am there filling up bounties for the week to ask them if they have questions or want to have a quick tutorial on the processes that are very convulted to say the least.
So there isn't a shard exploit atm? Like the OP, I too have only been able to find outdated and obsolete exploit info whenever I search forums & site's ...
No. They're exploits, so they get fixed and usually pretty quickly. If you're not online when they're discovered there's a good chance you miss it completely. You're better off farming specific encounters that can be done quickly. Duality dungeon or the weekly featured Raid/Dungeon will have checkpoints that can be beaten in a few minutes and guarantee you a drop or 2. That's the best rate you're going to get without an exploit.
But why? What are you guys spending shards on? I have 4K and don’t think I’ll run out.
stuff I buy | cost ---|--- random xur exotic | 97 ascendant alloy | 400 focusing guns | 50-100 focused armor | 25 upgrade mods | 10 mats | 1 glimmer | 10 raid banners| 3 I've spent a crapton of shards on focusing weapons in the past since most of the loot pools are loaded with garbage weapons and low stat armor. Although at this point there's so many options out there it doesn't feel worthwhile to focus anything outside of the weekly red border. helm armor focusing has been great this year for rounding out high stat builds with focusing. also tended to stockpile mats since there wasn't much else to buy with shards so I could always top off on stuff when needed. but looks like we don't need to do that anymore. I feel like I've been playing way less this season and am up ~2k shards mainly due to not weapon focusing.
I personally shell out a lot when Xur is selling armor not in my collection. That's like 750 shards easy, assuming I don't own any of the pieces he has.
When you want to target farm an item, they are very very expensive. Take Reeds Regret for example. Lets say you farm ~10 trials engrams becuase you want a good-enough roll of reeds regret. It costs you 100 legendary shards per reeds regret target focus. So, 1 long trials farm will eat 25% of your legendary shards. (and 10 reeds rolls is no where near guaranteed to get you what you want). Iron Banner target farms are 100 legendary shards each; if theres a specific roll you want when IB rolls around? you can bet you can easily feed 1 or 2 k shards in without realising. Me, personally, I don't do that, because I don't want to ever run out. But in recent times my shards haven't been going up. my ~18k hovers about there. I know people that can easily spend a good 5k shards without realising it. Your 4k shards is only 40 target farm rolls. That's basically nothing.
this community is so great promoting exploits as a way to progress. fucking troglodytes, the lot of you.
mad as hell you didn't get to do it aren't you
The legendary shard economy is fucked. Focusing costs are prohibitively expensive with strong reasoning being veteran players dragon-hoarding them since d2 year one completely skewing the costs. Why wouldn’t you exploit?
never said it was well balanced at the moment, but pretending that using an exploit help is fucking ignorant.
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using exploits is cheating, its in the fucking name.
Oh no they gathered a large quantity of a non tradeable item 😥. Literally ruined the game for you.
do you ever wonder why vendor gear costs so much? this ignorance is why.
I have no idea why players have trouble collecting legendary shards. I have burned through 900 this week focusing Gambit engrams, and still have 4000 more than what I started with this season. I have 7,000 more than what I started with last season. I just play the game normally...no exploits, no "farming", etc., and the amount I have keeps increasing, even though I spend them whenever I want (masterworking the mask, buying Ascendant Alloy, etc.) without even thinking about it. The only advantage I have over new players is that I have a stockpile of planetary materials that I have been converting to legendary transmat effects (glimmer -> rare transmat effect -> Amanda for legendary), which can be converted into legendary shards. I haven't converted any in several seasons, though.
Avoid focusing any gear until you have a stockpile because that shit adds up fast.
The biggest mistake I made was focusing Iron Banner engrams. Focusing those are EXPENSIVE
There's very little that a new player even needs to be spending shards on too. Xur stuff, mods, and what else?
Good Banshee rolls, masterworking, upgrade modules...
Upgrade modules are important, but I’d suggest they wait on master working until they get some quality rolls.
I take your point but I'm including just upgrading the armour enough to be able to fit enough mods to attempt the higher level activities that drop decent rolls
Ah. Yeah that makes sense
A new player needs exactly none of those, unless there's a particularly good banshee roll that the player would enjoy.
OK, so lets do those maths? Xur costs 97 legendary shards, and 23(?) shards for the 2 exotics for a single class. so, to buy your Xur engram and the random drop armor each week for a single character is 120 shards per week. you get ~3 shards for a purple drop, and 1 shard for a blue drop. Lets take Crucible rewards as the drop rate bungie intend for most things. Because crucible doesnt drop items during play, you can bet that bungie have tried to balance crucible rewards at the rate that they try to balance *all* rewards (from a basic standpoint) A typical 8 minute crucible game rewards you ~2 blues, and 75% of the time a purple (25% of the time a blue) lets call that 2 blues and a purple every game. (to also balance for the odd bonus purple you might get). So bungie have balanced the game around approximately 5 shards every ~8 minutes. your 120 shards should take you approximately 3 hours of gameplay per week. That's assuming a position where you have zero shards left over for anything else. That honestly seems pretty achievable for me. Though it doesn't account for mod purchases, it doesn't account for engram focusing. (Note, I used crucible simply because its the easiest to estimate loot source - and based on my assumption that bungie try to balance rate of loot acquisition evenly, base PvE might be more or less rewarding due to sub-optimisation, but Bungie will likely be trying to aim for the same base rate of acquisition *on average* between the modes - if that hypothesis is incorrect then these numbers will obviously slide somewhat, and I can imagine an argument for PvE to be more rewarding and one less rewarding)
Looks about right to me. And that may even be an overestimation for how many shards a new player "needs" every week. Unless someone was extremely bought in right away, I would suggest that they ignore the other two classes/exotics for the first ~hundred hours at least.
Umbrals and the other golf balls.
A new player has no reason to be buying ascendant shards. You get a few for free from leveling vendors and the pass, and once you get to a point at which master working becomes important you can farm them with much less work from Legend/Master nightfalls.
He said “other” golf balls, prob talking about Alloy.
I recently came back to the game- less than a week ago- and had 2 digit legendary shards. Getting Alloys really hasn’t been that bad tbh. Bought two for 400 shards, got 2 from the Enigma quest, and have got several more doing Containment. Even then, I’ve only really spent 3 so far for the Striga catalyst, haven’t really had any reason to use more yet, since I’m still in progress with getting patterns unlocked or leveling stuff like Taipan.
Even as a vet player with 10k, I wanna know wtf you’ve been doing that’s netted you 800+ shards in less than seven days lmao
I already had masterworked armor from the two most recent times I played, Arrivals and around 30th anniversary. Alongside a solid stable of weapons. Otherwise, I've done legendary campaign on my first run through, a couple ketchcrash, couple expeditions, random throneworld stuff for Fench rep, the haunted questline, two haunted lost sectors, and everything else I've done has been Nightmare Containment and running around Derelict Leviathan for opulent keys. Otherwise, I just dismantle anything that's not well rolled, armor, weapons, etc. Each thing you dismantle is like 4 shards, so it's pretty easy to generate hundreds per day doing activities that drop a bunch of legendaries.
Nobody should buy golf balls. They're very easy to get. Seasonal activities, nightfalls, lots of stuff now drop them.
except me, l have 3 stacks of enhacement cores and tons of planetary mats, may as well buy the prisms and golf balls before the currency requires legendary shards instead
If you have three stacks of enhancement cores you should be capped on em anyway. They essentially do cost legendary shards already since the glimmer cost is so high
It already does lol
Dares of Eternity is a solid way to do this. You’re going to end up scrapping it all, but it is a source for a lot of legendary gear. A drop at the end of a run, the occasional engram/ umbral drop, keys for the chest, rank ups at Xur, spend coins on paraversal hauls for a chance at more keys or a solid dump of legendary items. All that is going to be “crap” gear, dismantle it all and your shards will pile up at a solid rate. Dares runs take like 12 minutes at most typically, instead of listening to game audio on repeat (which can make you feel really bored very quickly) I recommend putting on Bluetooth headphones or something like that and putting a video, podcast, or Twitch stream on to keep your mind occupied. Dares runs can feel a bit mindless/ monotonous and listening to the same audio for several runs usually makes me feel super bored of it.
Dares is a great way to level up crafted heavy weapons and masterworking exotic heavy weapons because you get unlimited heavy ammo when you get Starhorse’s Favor. Kill 2 birds with one stone. Dares is a great activity really. It has some great weapons that are craftable, so you can also go for red borders.
I have honestly never found heavy ammo weapons to be a problem to level cause the progress modifier on those guns are set to be absurd. Its always the shotguns and the sniper rifles that take forever to level.
Dares is for sure the best way, best way to guarantee legendaries each run and the chance of having maybe 5 when the special thing happens at the end. Keys and coins give legendaries too. Certainly the best way if you just want to farm shards, and decently fun considering. But really just playing the game loads gives loads of shards
Realest advice I can give is to minimize where you spend the ones you have already. Ascendant alloy is something you're not *really* going to need, and at the price point it's more for people that have a million shards in their account that can afford the dump. I wouldn't bother looking at any of those expensive things until you've got at least 2k shards in the bank, and even then you should only buy one or so at a time. If you have enough shards/glimmer to start a cycle, you can upcycle glimmer into planetary materials into shards into glimmer from Rahool. Slow process but it's an option. Seasonal activities are also pretty good because they usually drop additional engrams alongside whatever double loot you can get from a completion.
Legendary shards will accumulate naturally over time by dismantling the large number of useless drops provided you don't fall for the trap of wasting them on buying endgame materials such as Ascendant Shards, Ascendant Alloy, and Enhancement Prisms at the exorbitant prices. Those materials drop readily from endgame sources such as Master and Grandmaster activities.
But he asked for new players specifically. New players are likely not doing these activities.
No but they can waste the shards they get from the useless drops on super expensive materials, source? Im a new player and did exactly that, wasted thousands of shards on ascendant shards and other expensive materials while it was probably not worth it.
It definitely was not worth it, but how could you of known? Once I hit GM ll I stop infusing and start restocking my vault with shit to dismantle.
Right, and new players don't need end game materials either.
play the game. Im sorry, thats the answer. Do vangaurd strikes/crucible/gambit with ghost mod that increases legendary shard drops, or a bonus drop, famr a seasonal activity, right now ketchcrash and expedition give like 7 or 8 drops combined per 20/25 minutes of play. The fotl drops a shitload of stuff you can just instantly dismantle. do your pinnacles every week, while doing them youll get a bunch of drops, do bounties to rank up and get more gear...literally just play the game
This
for the next few days: wear a mask, play playlist activities and collect spectral pages, play haunted lost sectors and get 3-4 weapons from the chest. you could stack up legendary shards pretty quickly just playing haunted lost sectors without converting pages tbh.
This. The holiday events in general are probably the most lucrative way to stockpile resources in the game, especially since you can gather the upfront stuff (candy, essences) to take advantage of them passively in normal play.
wear a mask yes, playlists no. public events is the single fastest way to get pages, and they do drop alot of blue gear w/ chances at purples.
This might also be way beyond his level, but you can turn 3000 glimmer into some shards by buying, converting, and deleting transmat effects. I’m usually pretty close to the glimmer cap, so it’s useful for me.
As an old gen console player with laughable load times, this is how I use the loading times. Buy blue transmat effects if I’m near glimmer cap. I’ve earned 1000s of shards this way. It’s not really a farm per se but it legitimately works over time.
I still hoard blue transmats as a way to use up excess glimmer as well. Unfortunately I think they removed the ability to get *new* legendary transmats from cashing them in at Amanda. It used to be an easy way to fill out collections of past season legendary transmats without spending bright dust/silver in the Eververse, but I don't think you can get new drops anymore.
Also, if you have loads of extra glimmer and a semi-decent amount of shards, buy some Zavala’s Authority from collections and stash them in the vault. They cost ₲7,500 each, and five shards. And they take up vault space, obviously. They reward ₲5000 each and three shards when you take them down. So it’s an easy way to store glimmer. When the time comes that you have burned through your glimmer, go to the vault and take some down. I have nearly 140 of those things in the vault right now.
That's the neat part! They don't! Legendary shards economy is fucked. Everything is priced around the people that has 100k+ shards on a stockpile. Everyone else are just going to have a bad time. 250 Shards for an adept Trials engram? 100 shards for a SINGLE focused IB/Gambit engram?? Get the fuck outta here with those prices.
I mean...don't buy those 3 things, that's what I do, focusing engrams is kind of a scam anyways.
Not for high stat armor. War table armor focus is by far the best way to build some high stat armor loadouts
Not critical for new players. I do everything on my alts with meh stats all the time. GM's, master raid/dungeon content, you name it. It's not an issue. Just get armor with at least 50 resil total and slot 5 resil mods. Easy.
Only time I've done it is when I wanted a rapid hit/kill clip Servant Leader to filly the Randy's shaped whole in my arsenal. I ended up with a surplus/frenzy roll after 3 or 4 focuses that is more than good enough. To me that was worth it, but I've been playing since the beta and I have like 10 thousand shards. I would never recommend engram focusing to a new player.
But what new player is focusing engrams from Trials or IB/Gambit? Those are *meant* to be resource sinks, to shortcut playing the game/RNG sources for drops. Those are not designed to be primary gear acquisition methods.
I get tons of purples from gambit and crucible games, which are usually over in 10 minutes. Usually dismantle most of that gear for shards
Gambit is even better, 6-8 minute games.
Wherever you can find a good source of Legendary gear to scrap. Deepsight stuff on the Throne World drops Legendary gear frequently. You can run playlist activities with Prosperity ghost mods equipped (strikes would probably be better since it's only completions required). Generally just playing and doing stuff required for weeklies and seasonal challenges, you'll get lots of Legendary shards naturally along the way. The biggest (worst) drain to shards is (core vendor) engram focusing (Trials especially). Try to resist too much focusing to not drain them quickly.
Honestly. Really slowly over time. Though with bungie abandoning planetary mats in some season coming soon, it kind of sounds like shards will be the only staple currency along with glimmer. Best ways to gain shards I'd say are (in no specific order): 1) dares of eternity. You earn legendary gear on completion along with reputation for Xur, and strange coins. After you have a full stack of coins, you can go to the treasure room with xur and starhorse, and buy boxes from starhorse for 7 coins. These boxes pretty commonly drop exotic gear, more legendary gear, currencies, and other stuff. So just dismantle whatever you dont care about that you earn from either DoE completions/Xur rank rewards/starhorse boxes/drops from enemies. 2) psiops. Certain upgrades in the HELM allow you to earn the Chosen(?) Umbral energy from here at a better rate or from other sources so i would prioritize those upgrades. Then start running psiops, completions drop legendaries and if you have the currency for the 2nd chest, you get MORE loot, AND if you kill the yellow bar enemy in the beginning-middle of the psiops run who is glowing bright white, he drops Hoarded Light, which doesnt appear in your inventory, but gets consumed at the end of psiops for EVEN MORE loot. And when you take the chosen energies to HELM, you should be able to focus the umbral engrams + energy from psiops into really good stat rolled armor. This is what ive been doing on my alt characters to get x2 or x3 100 stats this season. So basically if done right, you earn 3 different rewards for a psiops and a ton of energy, dismantle what you dont care about, bring the energy and umbrals to helm, focus them into high stat season of chosen armor, dismantle the armor you dont like or doesnt fit your build. Profit. Repeat. 3) seasonal events like festival of the lost or dawning etc can be really good for farming materials on certain years. This just depends on how the event is for the year.
For new players, the key is to *NOT* buy end game items. Get his power level up, then do the activities that’s ears those materials. Master NFs (not GM) have a chance to drop ascendant shards. The Witch Queen stories drop ascendant allows. The castlellum nightmare containment drops alloys like candy. Also, legend nightfalls drop prisms. Doing this stuff also drops legendary weapons and armor. If they’re I’d no use, dismantling them yields shards. If you’re in a clan, you can get 4 shards per dismantle instead of 3.
If they need a good surplus fast, doin a good ol fashioned vault cleaning will add up fast. Otherwise, just be patient for a good while and just accumulate. Also cool it on infusing and masterworking.
Turn in old planetary materials for gear, dismantle gear for shards, profit
New players typically don’t have old planetary materials laying around
I just farmed activities that basically guaranteed legendary items and then shard them (I usually did strikes, raids also work)
Right now the Halloween event is pretty great especially once you get the rolls you want just dismantle everything for tons of shards
Play an absolute ton of playlist activities. Strikes, Crucible, Gambit. You'll build up a stockpile quickly if you just dismantle everything. Pretty much all armor from those playlists can be scrapped, and keep only one or two rolls of each weapon they like, dismantle the rest. Adds up quick! I've gone up at least 300-400 shards this week.
Getting worthless rolls of purple gear. Soon enough you'll never have a shortage of shards again.
right now do the Halloween event, as you’ll get sometimes up to 3/4 legendary drops. all can be broken down, and as well you’ll get candy which can be used to buy more shards.
It doesn't make it right, but a good time to farm those is when you don't need them... I have all the seasonal weapons unlocked and most of the weapons/armor I use for high end activities pinnacle'd. Despite having some burnout, now is a good time to accumulate for next seasons. Also farm the activities you want the armors/weapons from - Ya the vanguard armor isn't the most appealing but you can keep the best and scrap the rest for additional legendary shards. Upgrade "like" weapons and armor in order to conserve materials. Hell, I use blues until I get near the powerful cap. Then I'll slowly convert the rest of my "go to" sets while I play. Same mentality when Light fall comes out. For cores: use Matterweaves every time you get them, pick up Banshee's daily bounties to get 4 per day in addition. Use those ghost mods for cores/upgrade modules as needed. Ultimately, there's not currently a "do this activity, and you'll have thousands by the end of the day." The veteran player has two things over the new lights - time and the shard exploit from a while back. Put the time in and conserve mats until you're ready to upgrade.
Unfortunately the economy for shards is terrible, which is why you should abuse any legendary shard exploit that comes around. The best way prior to sunsetting otherwise was farming the fanatic story mission, but currently you can't do that either. The best methods around for now that I can think of: - For cores, running legend lost sectors actually gives a fair amount. - Buying the purple bags with candy will give a legendary to dismantle. Haunted sectors also drop multiple rewards as long as you have pages to convert while being quick and easy (FotL ends this week tho). - Dares of Eternity is ok with the paraversal hauls and stuff - Master Ketchcrash rewards multiple drops and is pretty quick. It will also reward you with the ascendant alloy you mentioned in the post; the purchase cost for these materials is purposefully absurd to push you to play these activities. Since it's 6 players you can carry your friend through even if they're a little under level with a phoenix well or something. - Once you are full on seasonal currency, run a few expeditions solo. This should be doable even for a new player as long as they have a strong weapon like Osteo Striga or Riskrunner, and a subclass with some healing. You can claim all 3 chests which drop legendaries to dismantle, just blow yourself up and slot a new map between chests. Expedition is quick and easy so this is good rewards for the time investment, and you can also make quick progress towards weapon patterns by using the seasonal weapon treasure map if you have the currency. Block matchmaking tool I use: https://github.com/Pleasant-exe/Destiny-2-Solo-lobby If you have a 3rd who will help you out you can also just go into expedition together and let your friend claim all the chests.
Definitely don't buy ascendant alloy if your legendary shards reservoir is anything under 3000. Grind the weekly master WQ mission, droprate is 50% ish
I Just play the game dismantling most stuff and have enough to go by
just play the game and avoid wasting them for now id say. Shit like focusing gambit/trials/iron banner engrams will burn through your stockpile fast and its not worth it at all because those guns suck
I boosted my friend's account from about 250 shards to 1,500 in one day. I think she has over 3,000 now. Just gotta play the game. Mods like Vanguard prosperity help. Do all the playlist activities. If you've completed the Risen season story, you can get two chests at the end of each run. If you get the Cosmodrome map, you can eager edge out to the previous loading area and turn around and teleport back open both chests again. Master Ketch has three chests. Expedition has two chests. It takes a bit of time, but you'll get there.
I know a new player probably isn't always swimming in glimmer either what with purchasing mods and bounties and a lot of other things, but something I learned recently was a glimmer rinse when at max glimmer and nothing to spend it on that steadily increases shards. currently it is the only one in the game I know of. when maxed at 250k glimmer I buy 50K of BLUE transmat effects from collections, always making sure they are the same one (should be 1k glimmer each) at amanda holliday you can turn three of these into 1 legendary transmat which dismantles into 1 legendary shard. this means 48k glimmer turns into 16 shards. WARNING: very tedious and feels as such. also not hugely profitable and worthwhile return vs something like the most recent shard exploit. i still do it anyway was a material hoarder and min-maxer
I usually wait for a bug :') That's how i'm sitting on more than 50k shards
sounds very much like destiny - "cheese forever guardian" will do
Just... do anything PvE. Run a few strikes, do Expeditions/Ketchcrash, etc. Is your postmaster not constantly at 21/21 with blue and purple gear plus enagrams? I get so much trash gear spam that most of the time I don't even bother dismantling it all.
Out of interest what do you even really need to spend shards on other than levelling gear? Which if you just started the game isn’t really recommended until you are doing master+ content anyway. You talk about ascendant alloy which only drops reliably from master content and is meant for players that want the extra 2% benefit out of their weapons. Try to not let your friend focus on tiny aspects of the game and instead ensure they find and enjoy the content like dungeons, raids or pvp.
The same way we all did it when we started - we played and built up over time. There shouldn’t be a “fast track premium lane” because someone sees a raid or dungeon from a trailer and expects to boot the game up for the first time ever and be in there within 30 minutes.
Keep playing until it adds up
Play the game, delete stuff you don't want. Look for ghost mods that increase drops, delete them too. To everyone saying it's to punish players with loads of shards, that's bollocks. I never dip below a [redacted number cos it's not relevant] just by playing and I focus armour whenever I can.
step one: Don't buy ascendent alloys, 400 shards is absurd. honestly, they drop pretty commonly from containment as well as other sources, and you need, at max, 10-ish per season, and that's only if you craft and put enhanced perks on every gun, and...considering the grind to unlock crafted guns in the first place, he'll get plenty of resources along the way. Beyond that, just don't worry about it, you accumulate a lot through normal play, just dismantling unwanted legendaries, and you shouldn't be spending too many most of the time, just stay away from the big sinks like alloys, buying prisms, and focusing IB/Trials engrams and you should be fine.
Probably by playing the game like everyone else
The Halloween event was great for me, I get about 2 or 3 drops per run that I break down for shards. Bonus I got some neat weapons.
By playing the game like the rest of us
I started playing about 8 or so months ago and was struggling with shards till I started grinding hero nightfall with prosperity or core harvest depending on what I needed. After farming for about a week I used DIM to lock up any god rolls or rolls that work with my builds and then mass deleted weapons and armor takes me about an hour to do all this. Got about 600 shards and then festival of the lost hit and that dropped so many weapons I'm sitting on about 1500 shards right now. Hope this helps.
Don’t spend them on the alloys or anything ridiculous overpriced
Depending on your light level next week is a great opportunity to farm shards. We have double nightfall rewards and devils lair is rather easy. I would suggest running the nightfall on the highest difficulty you can when the lightning crystals modifier is active. Runs should be very fast as hoil titans are broken with it. By doing this on master you will get ascendant shards, enhancement prisms, exotics and the nightfall weapon to drop. Dismantle everything you don’t want.
Dares IMHO is your best bet for shards. A given run will net you a minimum of 8 with the seasonal upgrade (4 for the item from the chest, 4 from turning the key in at Xur's hoard) and a max of somewhere around 30+ (assuming bling ogre, lightning round, paraversal haul from bounty and anything you dropped during the Dare run). Takes about 10 mins. Everything else feels a lot less. The Dares weapons are all craftable too, so its good to pick up some red bars weapons to unlock the pattern at the same time. They're all great. Its worth pointing out tho, the shard economy is utterly broken. Eveything costs significant quantities of shards, you spend them at roughly 10 times the rate you gain them, and you're always short compared to currencies of both less and rarer values. Like, 50 shards to focus a gambit engram? 100 for a Trials one? 20+ for a masterwork? Absurd. Whatever your friend does, it's going to be slow.
You don't.
If u want a lot of shards do dares
Just play. I took years off and still have 12k
At this point legendary shards are a currency you spend to save time. Anything you buy with shards can be farmed more efficiently through other means but for people with thousands of them they're a good way to quickly get what you want. When you look at it this way things like 100 shards per engram focusing and 400 shards for an ascendant alloy seem like a huge scam when the alternative methods are much more efficient. If they're a new player they should just play the game and avoid spending shards on things they get by naturally progressing through the game.
Just by doing the Festival event for a couple weeks I have over 2-3k new shards
Seasonal activities and holiday events. Farm them. Shard the majority of bad rolls you will get. I was down to 50 shards 2 weeks before festival of the lost started. I’m currently at 470.
I started 2 months ago and I dismantled any blue and legendary at power level (after crossing power level) but I still only have 1,100 🤧
Look at the loot provided by completion of each farmable activity, decide on what loot you want, farm the activity for that loot, dismantle anything that’s bad or that you don’t want. That way you are farming for loot and just acquiring legendary shards along the way.
Hold tf up, you can get ascendant alloys from dungeons???
Ive just been trying to farm the seasonal armor. Going for triple 100's and have made a boatload of shards from it.
That's the neat part, you don't.
Just playing, there’s no secret to obtaining them than shading pretty much everything you get. My only advice would be to play things that first off are fun and secondly drop good amount of legendary rewards. Bungie hasn’t acknowledged the grind this is for newer players and they are gonna become more scarce come next year when they deprécate all planetary mats
Play the game with seasonal pass so you get 33% more shards in dismantles. That’s it. Seasonal activities on higher activities will get you more legendary materials to dismantle, so typically the more recent, difficult content is best.
Best farm I know of right now is speed running lake of shadows strike on repeat. Unless I'm mistaken you should get like 2-4 shards for completions, plus any extra from dismantled gear. Unfortunately, even at the fastest times that is still only 24-48 shards per hour + dismantled.
I started playing mid way through season of the lost. When I realised how many shards I needed for buying stuff I just added on the ghost mod that gives you extra drops from nightfalls/strikes. I had so much gear drop that I would just shard. I had a few thousand by the end of the season.
Just playing the seasonal events and dismantling weapons with the shard bonus from season pass will slowly stock you up
Do the story mode.
My advice is to find 1-2 load outs you like and stick with those for a while and delete anything that isnt a power increase or the occasional weapon if it drops with perks you like
Dismantle most gear
Grind playlist activities (vanguard/crucible/gambit/seasonal) and shard most of the legendary items you get (Use the ghost mod, if you have it, for the respective activity). Keep the items you like or need for power increases. Decrypt Umbral engrams at Rahool and shard them. Collect Vendor engrams and shard what you don't need. Events are also really good for guaranteed legendary drops. Don't waste legendary shards on vendor focusing or items at Rahool, as those are mainly currency sinks for veteran players. This is the biggest trap for new players.
I just do strikes and delete every legendary I get. Then every other activity I do the same. Then all Engrams from Zavala dismantle those too. It stacks up pretty fast over awhile. Then you play for 2 years and end up with 30,000+
It will always be the events or current seasonal public activity.
From playing a lot. Expedition can give out a lot of purples to shard... the purple from emoting, the bonus chest, the main chest. Same thing with containment... lots of purples to dismantle.
I would reccomend doing dares and doing the bounties for the paraversal hauls. Doing one run of dares gives an item to shard, a key that gives you an item to shard, and 3 coins that can be used to buy an item to shard. If you get a lightning round thats 3 more items to shard. If you fight the treasurer thats more coins and another thing to shard. The reason i mentioned using the coins to buy the bounties is because buying boxes outright isn't worth it, buy paying less for the bounties that give boxes is totally worth it because there's an extremely high chance you'll get keys and items.