Not really, there's a few things you can do pretty easily: 1) Do the weekly strike (which is lvl 22) to get several coins per week 2) Do the daily bounties and mission for vanguard rep and marks 3) Do a bunch of lvl 24 strikes at 6 vanguard marks each (and 25 rep) 4) As soon as you get 13 coins, buy the armor from Xur on the next Friday/Saturday 5) As soon as you get to vanguard rank 2 and get 130 coins, get both two of the following: boots, gloves, chest (whichever you didn't get from Xur) 6) Play stuff to level your gear and upgrade the armor on it to get more light. 7) You'll be like lvl 26 by now (and if you did it right you will have had hours of fun!!!) This way, even without any legendary drops you'll have 2 guaranteed legendary armor pieces and an exotic.

Go farm the cave, yes the cave. :D

[quote]I've put in over 10 hours and haven't received any higher light or armor at all. Any pointers?[/quote] Grind rep buy purples

Im lvl 28 ;) its not that hard...

Factions.

Join a faction and rank them up!

you need to get someones rank up, new monarchy, dead orbit, future war cult, vanguard, crucible. to do the FWC dead orbit and monarchy you need to buy and wear the class item, that makes it so all rep youd get goes to them. then buy gear from them with crucible marks. then do the queens mission and get legendarys from there or break them down for ascendant shards to upgrade your legendarys. also save your strange coincs for xur to get an exotic.

Had that issue, till I got lucky in drops and got vangaurd rank up. Now I have awesome gear :D