That's the thing, if you want to only be running the normal raid weekly, then there's rather literally no reason to progress beyond 28. If you want to be running the normal and hard raid weekly, say starting this week, you need to grind out the mats for hitting 29 with your current setup.
Well, do bear in mind that acquisition rate will accelerate:
- As you fill more slots with Legendaries that you want to keep, each legendary drop you get in those slots is either for an alt, or shards
- Ditto with the gear from marks; marks need to be spent, but you'll likely have gear in the slots you can buy them for that's the same or better. Buy and turn into shards.
- Daily Heroic Story at 28 is 2 guaranteed mats a day- per character. Nightfall has a chance for ~10 ascendant materials per week, per character. Marks are per character. The more endgame alts you have, the more total shards you can acquire in a week.
- Even Xur's stuff can be dismantled for shards if you don't need anything else you'd want to spend coins on.
It's possible to control your own progression and hit 29, but not possible to do so for level 30. Is it worth it to hit 29, though? Totally up to the individual and their plans.
exactly, this is what I'm talking about all around. You can't control when you get to 30, but you can control getting to 29, which lets you run the hard mode raid reasonably.