You used to be able to buy shards?! Idk why they ever got rid of that if it was a thing! It sounds really good honestly. The only way currently to get them Is one per daily event and the raid. And odds are of you need shards or energy you probably can't even do the raid yet. Once I started the raid I never ran out of either of them. I get too many honestly
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1 ascendent per daily public event (or mote or coin) and 2 for daily heroic story on level 28 (1 @ L 26) With 3 characters at level 28, you can potentially pull down 9 ascendants a day, not counting Raid, Nightfall or other miscellaneous ways via rng.
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People were exploiting it by making a new character, buying weekly limit of Xur's shards/energy, putting them in vault, deleting character and repeating.
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some people are doing this to run raid to get gear