One of us! One of us!
As you've already heard, PVP isn't a good way to farm for gear or power, with the exception of Iron Banner which has unique gear and lots of powerful gear bounties. You should PM
Ruthless to get an invite to the Era Discord; if you're on PS4 then I'd be happy to do the Y1 raids with you!
Also, remember to visit Xür every weekend. Buy everything he's selling if you don't have it already (even for classes you don't have yet), and then get the engram he sells for an extra Y1 exotic you don't already have. There are lots of Y1 exotics that are super useful, so it's worth getting them all.
Finally, you should get Whisper. It's kind of a pain, but you need for a certain public event to spawn on Io, and then kill a certain enemy. That will spawn a portal to a secret time mission that will give you one of the best exotic snipers in the game. You pretty much need it for certain encounters, especially in the raids, so that's worth doing too. Asking around in the Discord should get you some help, just let everyone know you're a kinderguardian!
I mean, I think originally they were their guns; we took them from them.