In Destiny 2, Ascendant Shards are important materials. Without this item, you cannot masterwork any piece of armor. While it’s not very important to masterwork your armor, if you don’t do so, you won’t be able to get the optimum amount of mods on your armor pieces. Not only that, masterworking a piece of armor provides a minor stat boost as well, so you wouldn’t want to miss out on that either.
With Lightfall arriving in less than a month, it’s always wise to head into the new campaign with a fully masterworked armor setup. Moreover, the developers are reworking the armor and the combat mods too, so it’s really important that you head into the new campaign with at least one set of masterworked armor. But you can’t do so if you don’t have Ascendant Shards, so how do you get your hands on this item?
Where to Farm Ascendant Shards in Destiny 2?
Achieve Rank 16 in Playlists, Rinse and Repeat
There are a few ways in which you can get your hands on these Ascendant Shards in Destiny 2 before Lightfall goes live. One of the easiest methods is to make your way up to Rank 16 with the playlist vendors at the Tower. Commander Zavala, Lord Shaxx, Drifter, and Saint-14 will reward you with one Ascendant Shard when you hit reputation rank 16 with them. You can reset your rank and then make your way up to rank 16 once again to get your hands on another Ascendant Shard.
You can do this as many times as you want, but the grind can be slightly tedious.
Visit Master Rahool
Alternatively, you can also purchase Ascendant Shards from Master Rahool, the Cryptarch at the Tower. One Ascendant Shard costs 10 Enhancement Prisms, so if you manage to get your hands on a good number of these prisms, you won’t run out of Ascendant Shards. However, given that Enhancement Prisms are also required when masterworking armor pieces, this isn’t a very fruitful way to go about it.
Complete Grandmaster Nightfalls
The final method is to run Grandmaster Nightfalls. Apart from the Adept version of the Nightfall weapon in rotation, you will also receive one Ascendant Shard for every successful Grandmaster Nightfall completion. If you do this when double Nightfall rewards are active, you will receive two shards for every successful completion. You can also get these shards by leveling up your Season Pass, but the number is very limited. Not only that, you can do this once per season per account, so it isn’t exactly a farmable alternative.
Do keep in mind that you will be able to store only 10 Ascendant Shards in your inventory and another 10 with your Postmaster for each character, which brings the total number of shards up to 40. And if you’re heading into Lightfall with 40 of these shards, you needn’t have to worry about masterworking any new piece of high-stat armor that you might be able to get your hands on in Lightfall!
If you’re done farming for these Ascendant Shards in Destiny 2, here’s a checklist of everything you need to do in order to prepare for the upcoming expansion.
Destiny 2 is available now on PS5, Xbox Series S|X, PS4, Xbox One, and PC
