Recent Destiny patches appear to have removed common sources of Ascendant materials (Ascendant Shards & Ascendant Energy), which are still required to upgrade old gear.
From Destiny 1.2.0.1 Patch Notes:
- Newly acquired Faction reward packages will no longer produce Shards
- The Cryptarch will no longer convert newly acquired Legendary Engrams to Shards (possibilities include gear/weapons or Exotics)
- Expansion II featured Daily Heroic activities will produce Motes of Light in lieu of Shards
Though it doesn't appear to be specified in the Patch Notes, I've also noticed that certain other events (e.g.: your first gold-tier Public Event each day) appear to generate Motes instead of Ascendant materials.
What options remain for those who still want/need to get Ascendant materials?
45 Answers
Assuming you have installed House of Wolves, here are the locations I know of that you can still earn ascendent materials:
- Daily Story mission (for missions from the base game and The Dark Below; missions from House of Wolves give motes)
- Chests and bosses in the Vault of Glass
- Dismantling old (pre-House of Wolves) gear
The Speaker can convert between Ascendant Shards and Ascendant Energy, but this assumes you have enough of one material in order to convert it into the other.
Prior to the House of Wolves, you could also get ascendent materials from the following:
- Completing a Public event
- In Public event packages
- Completing the Weekly Nightfall Strike
- Decrypting Legendary Engrams
- Dismantling legendary weapons and armor
- Rarely from chests during patrol
The only way I have found to get ascendant/radiant shards/energy (which you can swap between shards/energy) is to do Vault of Glass for ascendant, and Crota's End for radiant.
Dismantling year 1 weapons now only gives motes of light, and NOT shards/energy, as far as I can tell, which is good for every day, but annoying when you have a Y1 weapon you may still want to upgrade.
As for the raids, they are extremely easy, laughable almost with being overpowered now, especially with the new subclasses (nightstalker mostly) that they were not mechanically designed for. This is coming from someone who didn't get into raids until Oryx. The most difficult part would be finding people, which you don't really need a full fireteam.
Those still in the expansion The Dark below to still be able to have Shards drop. This I can confirm because I still havent gotten the second Expansion. Public events and Heroic Level 30 and 26 Storylines will drop these.
3Now that you can exchange Asc energy for Asc shards, one new way is to level up purple weapons and then discard them in exchange for Asc energy which you can swap for Shards.
1You can still get Ascendant shards and energy from Vault of Glass, as well as the daily (if it's a HoW mission). But what the patch notes are saying is that you can't obtain shards from engrams and faction packages (Vanguard, Crucible, and the Factions). Now the speaker is selling Ascendant shards for energy. If you are running low on shards and have a lot of energy, then you can always change energy for shards.
I hope this helped. Good luck Guardian.
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