Quote Originally Posted by sanahtlig View Post
Yes, you should be enhancing intermediates after weapon skill LV5, then using those intermediates to enhance the weapon of interest.
What he said is totally correct, if a bit confusing if you don't know what he's talking about lol. The N weapons are worthless - the rare weapons are used to upgrade skills. If you're not sure how to do that efficiently, there's quite a few posts, and perhaps far more relevantly lol, Sanahtlig has a lot of info in his toolbox (see his sig).

As for the original question, is there any easier way than just doing the 10x pulls... no. You'll be doing that a lot. Over the past 2 days I've dropped maybe 130k in gems, and got 2 full assault weapons from skill 0 to skill 20. Kind of tedious, but hey, the results are totally worth it.