I think that Bungie forgot how much of these materials each piece of gear demands to develop them when they tweaked the drops on Ascendant materials. A piece of armor eats up [b]18[/b] Shards, if it's Legendary; three times it wants to be fed six Shards. It's slightly different with Exotic Gear, Exotics want to be fed twice, eight shards each for a total of 16 Shards. We have four pieces of armor, though, and long-term, we're going to need some armor redundancy since we can only equip one Exotic piece at a time, and a lot of Exotic pieces are annoyingly tailored to particular Subclasses. Me, I have a good Exotic helmet and a good piece of Exotic armor, and I'm going to have to develop both of those, plus a Legendary helmet and Legendary armor so I can alternate between my Exotics for which sublass I want to use. Long story slightly shorter, that's [b]72[/b] Shards just for the Legendary gear, and another 32 on the Exotic pieces. A bare-bones equipment set up is still 56 Shards in total, one Exotic and three Legendary pieces. This is a huge demand for of Shards - just Shards here - and the game is just not yielding them. Well, not unless you're one of the poor maniacs that's actually able to get to the end of the Vault of Glass to be showered in Ascendant materials instead of proper loot, but I digress. The game does not yield enough Shards for what it demands. Instead of eating 6 shards at a time for 3 upgrades on Legendaries, it should eat 2 for the first of the three, 4 for the next, and six for the final. That'll reduce Shard consumption by a third. Exotics, eh. Leave 'em. They're rare. They can eat 16 Shards. Whatever. The game then needs to yield more Ascendant materials. This is a major hold-up for a lot of us who are struggling with some of the End Game material, especially when we finally manage to get a group going for the Vault. And that End Game came way too soon.