Destiny Ascendant Shard Farming and Lvl 30 Grind Guide

Destiny Ascendant Shard Farming and Lvl 30 Grind Guide by MDIGN

Edit: Make sure to farm with alternate characters as well to boost maximum results.

By now you’ve hit lv 28 and are stuck wondering “what the heck do I need to do?” Or better yet “how do I do what I need to do”. You’re most likely trying to hit level 29 so you can do VoG on Hard to collect that extra Raid Gear you need to hit 30. Except there’s one problem, you’ve hit the ‘Shard Wall’ and you’ve hit it hard. While it seemed like you got out of it with ‘The Queen’s Wrath’ Event, Bungie said ” Nope, buzz off high level players. Go find something else to have fun doing,” but they forgot that they’ve already taken the loot cave out! So now we’re stuck here twiddling our thumbs wondering where our next fix shards will come from. Well here’s your answer!

Primary Harvesting Methods: (Guaranteed Shards, but extremely time consuming)

1) Vanguard and Crucible/Faction Gear

By now you should have at least one of these to Rank 3+ if not, you’re missing out on tons of shards. To maximize your results you NEED Vanguard and another faction to both be Rank 2+. Once you have them at their appropriate ranks you’ll need to buy the chest armor from them then dismantle it, they’re garbage anyway as they cap you out at Lv.29.(For some reason I get more shards from dismantling chest armor.) With 100 Marks a week you can net 6 Legendary gears each 2 weeks(3Vang 3Fact) or 2 pieces a week. Which boils down into 12min-18max shards in 2 weeks. However you should still have a few marks saved up from the first 2 weeks.

2) Vanguard and Crucible/Faction Rep

Once you’ve gotten your factions to Rank 2 and used all of your marks, pick one factio. that you’re going to stick with and do the Weekly Nightfall and Heroic in that order. From here on your going to be farming rep to hit Rank 4+. Each time your faction goes past Rank 3 you’re rewarded with one of their vendor items, this is typically armor post Rank 3, but it can drop weapons as well. Same process, shred the gear and grab the shards.

3) Vault of Glass (Normal, Hard)

By now you’ve most likely completed the raid on Normal, but there’s will more loot to collect on Hard! For some reason people don’t know that the rewards from VoG Hard and Normal are unlinked and reset every week. If you’re Lv 29, find a group and beat that Vault until its a pile of shattered glass and shards.

Sub and Passive Harvesting Methods: (These are luck based and will net mixed results.)

1) Activities. These are all time based and there are plenty of maps showing when and where events should pop. So grab a fire team and hop to it. These garuntee no shards and you stop receiving rewards after a set number of times a day.

2) Passive: Motes of Light. This is pretty straightforward, over time you will automatically get Notes as opposed to levels. You’ll want to use these to buy an exotic engram from Xür for 23 motes and then boil down the result into shards. The engram is usually Exotic or Legendary, have yet to hear of a blue or green drop.

3) Semi-Passive: Strange Coins. Same as with the motes of light except these are complete random outside of Nightfall and Heroic weeklys. Same concept as earlier except you’ll be buying the gear Xür has for sale.

4) Semi-Passive: Cryptarch. Your goal here is not necessarily Legendary engrams, but to level him up. Once you get the Cryptarch’s level high enough he will send you Legendary engrams in the mail as ‘apology letters’. Rinse and repeat hoping for Legendary gear.

5) Rare: Chests. When opening chests you have a probability of getting a shard. After numerous chest runs from planet to planet, the probability is estimated to be <1%.

6) Rare: Daily Heroic. While some have reported otherwise, the possibility of getting shards from the daily story is there. However they are estimated to have a drops rate similar to that of being in a chest regardless of mission difficulty. (Tested… every day.)

7) Random: Crucible. The Crucible has the best RNG for everything, but also the worst at the same time. It can reward you anything from shards to legendaries for your gear grind.

?) Post 1.02: Strike Playlist. After the newest patch, strikes are supposed to be more rewarding, but we’ll see about that.

As a Lv. 29 I can confirm that this is the fastest way to cap out your gear. I would be 30, but I can’t find a hard VoG group to get my last piece of raid gear.