Sorry for the mean/unhelpful comments. This is not the greatest community. I find that the Reddit for Destiny is often more friendly/helpful, FYI. So to actually answer your question - the only way to get good gear (other than grinding) is to be incredibly lucky. There are stories told of people who got amazing gear/armor in their first drops, so it can happen. Obviously this is not a great solution because it's completely outside your control. The earner's path: you need a full set of purple or better gear to get to 31. Arms and legs. These are pretty easy - only requires ~60 marks for each and no commendations, and you can buy this from the vendors. Chest/helmet. This is harder - you need 150 marks plus a commendation for each. One key shortcut (which still depends a bit on luck) is to try to accumulate motes of light. Xur (weekend vendor) will sometimes sell exotic armor engrams for 23 motes each. Minus of these is that they decode to a random class, so you may need multiple engrams to get something your character can actually wear. On the plus side, getting that helmet or chest can speed things up quite a bit, and the exotics go up to 36 light, so they'll boost you more than the other gear. You need to get to at least rep level 3 with the vendors to buy everything, and commendations don't start dropping till level 3 or higher. So level 3 with at least one vendor is critical. Vanguard is the fastest. You're also dealing with the 100 mark/week limit. If you stick with Vanguard, it'd take you three weeks to accumulate enough marks to buy just arms, legs, and either a chest or a helmet. To speed this up, you'll need to accumulate crucible marks as well (so you can get 200 total marks/week, 100 from vanguard and crucible each), which means you'll also need to accumulate rep with either crucible or a faction. So the fastest way to get all this done would still be about a week and a half - to get leveled up with both vanguard and crucible/faction, and earn 100 marks for both vanguard and crucible over two weekly reset periods. I'd estimate that at about 10-12 hours in the crucible and 8-10 hours in PvE if you're pretty efficient. So it'll take you at least 20 hours, spread out over at least a week+ (due to the weekly mark limitation). Unfortunately that's the fastest way to get there other than being lucky.