[quote]Dear Bungie, please listen to my sob story and take pity. I began playing Destiny relatively late, starting vanilla campaign around end of February. I typically can afford to play 2-3 45 min sessions / week and a longer session on the weekend. I reached lvl 31 using Vanguard armor by the time HoW dropped. I have a total of about 8 Legendary weapons pre-HoW. I had maxed out my armor with ascendent shards and 1 weapon by the then. Here comes all the changes of the House of Wolves and related patches, which included many changes to the Destiny material economy. This means that many of my other 7 Legendaries I have been spending months slowly building them up and upgrading are now going to take even longer to finish upgrading. I still need about [b]72 more Ascendent energies[/b] to get 331 damage with all of them. in the mean time being even more under-powered during all the latest new content (PvP events, Prison Of Elders). Fortunately, the exotics have a straight forward upgrade path through purchases from Xur. My old legendaries are going to be even harder to get to a useful level, although I have already invested a ton of time into them so far. The new trading system does not help, since it only lets you transform from Ascendent Shards to Energy and vice versa, but not from any other economy item, like exotic shards, motes of light, strange coins, vanguard marks etc... Here is why it is now so hard to get Ascendent Material [b]Daily Heroic missions,[/b] are still the only place to reliably get ascendent materials. However now that there are some House of Wolves heroic missions in the rotation, you can no expect to get 2 materials per day (per character if you had multiple characters). [b]Packages for Public Events[/b], used to regularly drop some ascendent materials, now seems to only drop planetary materials. [b]Purple / blue engrams[/b] rarely turned decrypted into ascendent materials. I guess this was removed. [b]Faction Level packages[/b] sometimes contained ascendent materials, this was removed in the update [b]Dismantling Legendary Gear[/b] If you got a drop of a new legendary, you used to be able to dismantle into some energies/shards, but now most drops are House of Wolves gear, which when dismantled turns into a single mote of light (almost useless). [b]Vault of Glass Raid[/b]. I suppose this is the best option to get a bunch, but it requires the coordinating of 6-member raid team, about 1 hr of your time (at least, depending on your team). I don't play regular hours, don't have any real-world friends on my system (PS3) so never had a consistent raid team (I must be a terrible human being). Solutions: Give up on my pre-HoW weapons I invested so much time in already (and kind of like) and just look to get House of Wolves weapons from drops. Might as well dismantle my old stuff to make space. Grind Daily Heroics for at least 40-50 days (just guessing I can get 2 materials close to every day). This is not a realistic option for my life, sorry. Why couldn't Destiny just keep some of the other options to get those materials. Some players may have way too many of those, but for a lot of us, it's even harder to catch up to the latest and greatest. What would a player do if they just started playing vanilla Destiny now? Why couldn't they make it so you could dismantle weapons to keep upgrading the ones that we already have and are in the progress of maxing out?[/quote] Dude you cab trade materials at the speaker! Also vault of glass is great for obtaining these. Message if you need a group!