How do I get Ascendant Shards & Ascendant Energy?
Solution 1:
Assuming you have installed House of Wolves, here are the locations I know of that you can still earn ascendent materials:
- Daily Story mission (for missions from the base game and The Dark Below; missions from House of Wolves give motes)
- Chests and bosses in the Vault of Glass
- Dismantling old (pre-House of Wolves) gear
The Speaker can convert between Ascendant Shards and Ascendant Energy, but this assumes you have enough of one material in order to convert it into the other.
Prior to the House of Wolves, you could also get ascendent materials from the following:
- Completing a Public event
- In Public event packages
- Completing the Weekly Nightfall Strike
- Decrypting Legendary Engrams
- Dismantling legendary weapons and armor
- Rarely from chests during patrol
Solution 2:
The only way I have found to get ascendant/radiant shards/energy (which you can swap between shards/energy) is to do Vault of Glass for ascendant, and Crota's End for radiant.
Dismantling year 1 weapons now only gives motes of light, and NOT shards/energy, as far as I can tell, which is good for every day, but annoying when you have a Y1 weapon you may still want to upgrade.
As for the raids, they are extremely easy, laughable almost with being overpowered now, especially with the new subclasses (nightstalker mostly) that they were not mechanically designed for. This is coming from someone who didn't get into raids until Oryx. The most difficult part would be finding people, which you don't really need a full fireteam.