Someone had mentioned to me that going to the spider, and buying alot of the cheapest planetary material he is selling, then go to that planet and turn in. Dismantle everything you get, plus you'll get shards back as well.

Not sure on numbers or percentages, but I'm sure its a less than desirable rate of return.

I can believe that this might be the best way, but that's still really bad it seems in my experience.

So I have 1100 shards. If I bought planetary matts with that then...
1100 x 5 = 5500 matts
5500 matts / 20 = 275 armor pieces
Even if I get a mod in a piece of armor every 20 pieces, which has not been my experience. That's only 12 mods for 1100 shards. And that is 12 random mods! maybe that is still optimistic...

You are definitely right, far from what we need. They need to add consistent ways to get these materials. RNG on the armor you want, at the light you need, with the ROLLS you desire is bad enough. Then add in trying to mod it, blegh. Banshee and his Alzheimers needs to provide some bounties for this and master work cores.

I have only put mods into my raid gear on 1 character, 3 of which are Transcendant Blessings Mods and so I know I can get more of those throught he Ritual pursuits. Weapons wise, only my Bygones and Trust have them. Too greedy to do much else at this point.

Someone had mentioned to me that going to the spider, and buying alot of the cheapest planetary material he is selling, then go to that planet and turn in. Dismantle everything you get, plus you'll get shards back as well.

Not sure on numbers or percentages, but I'm sure its a less than desirable rate of return.

In particular, use this method when he’s selling Simulation Seeds. Brother Vance will sometimes give you Masterwork drops in addition to legendary drops. I bought 700 shards worth of simulation seeds last week... I traded all the seeds into Vance, and ended up with about 20 masterwork cores, 30 mod components, and almost 600 legendary shards back in my inventory.

Is brother Vance special? Just curious as to why he drops Masterworks?

Someone had mentioned to me that going to the spider, and buying alot of the cheapest planetary material he is selling, then go to that planet and turn in. Dismantle everything you get, plus you'll get shards back as well.

Not sure on numbers or percentages, but I'm sure its a less than desirable rate of return.

In particular, use this method when he’s selling Simulation Seeds. Brother Vance will sometimes give you Masterwork drops in addition to legendary drops. I bought 700 shards worth of simulation seeds last week... I traded all the seeds into Vance, and ended up with about 20 masterwork cores, 30 mod components, and almost 600 legendary shards back in my inventory.

Dang. This was the method Speed suggested. But I haven't had a good week to do it yet.

In particular, use this method when he’s selling Simulation Seeds. Brother Vance will sometimes give you Masterwork drops in addition to legendary drops. I bought 700 shards worth of simulation seeds last week... I traded all the seeds into Vance, and ended up with about 20 masterwork cores, 30 mod components, and almost 600 legendary shards back in my inventory.

Why does that game make you do this? Why not simply sell Masterwork cores for 5 shards per if you can do what you just did? Save us the trouble.

There are too many useless materials and so much bullshit in this game already. What's the difference between one planetary material and the other? There isn't any. The game needs one currency and that is glimmer. No shards. No Simulation seeds. Just glimmer. This shit is soul crushing and boring so it should be streamlined.

Also because there's a glimmer cap, you're always going to have to play to earn more if it's used for everything.

Masterwork cores make sense because they do something unique, but I don't see why Spending 75,000 glimmer with banshee shouldn't let you masterwork something.

Fewer roadblocks. Simplify currency. Just stop getting in the way of fun.

There is a reason I am in the 540s and have no motivation to go up. It's all the bullshit in the way (and the fact that I will likely not be able to raid blind - another boneheaded move with the raid power level).

I don't understand why Bungie keeps making the game better, but then adds fucking shit to it that ruins the good parts. I'd love to be doing all the cool high level stuff, but not enough that I am going to do the pointless grind.

You can buy planetary materials which are rotationally used to buy Shards from Spider. I grow my Shards that way (up over 2.1k since Forsaken started where I was at 1.3k) and I still spend 30 every day I remember to getting MW cores from Spider and on other things. Breaking down legendary world shaders as discussed here already if you aren’t using them is a good boost, too.