Destiny 2's latest event, the Empyrean Foundation restoration, has begun. Saint-14 is asking Guardians to donate their Polarized Fractaline to the Foundation to lay the groundwork for something to come. If anyone can give 5,000 or more Fractaline by the end of the Season of Dawn, they'll get a unique emblem and a triumph. If the community as a whole donates a specific amount (as of writing, this has yet to be determined) of Fractaline, every player will get a new shader. But how do you get Polarized Fractaline, and what's the best way to get a lot of it? We have all the answers. Here's our guide on the best strategies you can use to get as much Polarized Fractaline as possible.
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Where you can get Polarized Fractaline
There are a variety of ways that you can earn Polarized Fractaline. These include:
- Completing Obelisk Weekly Bounties
- Completing Saint-14 Daily Bounties
- Using Fractaline Skimmers
- Completing Season of Dawn triumphs (not repeatable)
- Completing Strikes and matches of Crucible and Gambit
- Finishing runs of The Sundial and The Menagerie
- Getting Fractaline generated weekly by the Tower Obelisk
However, getting Fractaline from the latter three sources won't be available to you until you invest in upgrading Obelisks (the new terminals on The Tangled Shore, the EDZ, Nessus, and Mars). We'll return to them later in the guide, but for now, let's focus on the strategy everyone can take advantage of bounty grinding.
Bounties: A long (but effective) grind
Unless you upgrade your Obelisks, your only consistent source of Fractaline will be Daily Bounties from Saint-14, as well as Weekly Bounties from Obelisks. Saint-14 sells four daily, and each rewards 50 Polarized Fractaline upon completion, while each Obelisk has two bounties available per week that reward 100. If you have three characters, you can complete these bounties with them, too. This means that the maximum amount of Fractaline you can get in a week doing bounties is 6,600 (4,200 from Daily Bounties, 2,400 from Weekly Bounties). Doing this gives you a ton of Fractaline fast, but it's a long and tedious grind to do every week. Therefore, we recommend only chasing this max number for one week and then doing bounties at a more leisurely pace afterward if you're planning to upgrade your Obelisks. This is because upgrading Obelisks will help unlock some much easier ways of getting Fractaline. If you only care about getting the triumph and emblem (or if you don't have several characters to use) you could just donate 5,000 Fractaline from your hardcore bounty grinding right away — however, you'll be missing out on the benefits the Obelisks have to offer unless you spend extra time grinding even more bounties.
The bounties from Saint-14 and the Obelisks will require you to perform simple tasks, like killing a specific type of enemy with 100 precision final blows or getting kills with a specific element. The best place to complete the bounties tends to be The Tangled Shore, as it has plentiful amounts of Fallen, Scorn, Cabal, and Hive — all four of which are the foes the bounties will typically ask you to take down.
In addition to bounties, there are also Fractaline Skimmers that everyone can buy at the Tower Obelisk for some Glimmer. These give you a chance to get 100 Fractaline upon completing matchmade activities, but once you get the drop, the effect goes away. You're limited to six purchases per week, per account, so they're more of a tool to bolster your grinding than a dependable source of Fractaline.
Upgrading Obelisks: A smart investment
Once you have a ton of Fractaline from bounties, you should head to each of the four Obelisks and upgrade their Resonance Ranks. Doing this provides various benefits such as unlocking special armor mods or improving how much loot you can get per completion of The Sundial. When you hit level six Resonance Rank on each Obelisk, you'll be able to buy a permanent Fractaline Extractor buff from it with Glimmer that gives you a good chance of getting 100 Fractaline from completing Strikes, matches of Gambit or Crucible, and runs of The Sundial and The Menagerie. Something important to note, though, is that each Obelisk is tied to a specific activity. Because of this, you should start by upgrading the Obelisk that provides this buff to your favorite activity. The EDZ Obelisk is tied to Strikes, the Mars Obelisk is for Crucible, the one on The Tangled Shore is for Gambit, and the one on Nessus connects to The Sundial and The Menagerie. By upgrading the Resonance Ranks up to level nine, you'll get the option to upgrade the chances of the buff procing, too. This should be done right away, so you maximize your chances at getting drops. You should stop at eleven for each Obelisk until all four are to that point; once there, you can keep upgrading if you wish (more on that in a second).
These buffs should lead to you getting plenty of random Fractaline drops while playing, but even if you end up getting bad luck with the drops, don't worry. Upgrading the Obelisks has a much more direct impact on another method of getting Fractaline: Tower Obelisk generation.
The Tower Obelisk: Return on investment
Once you've gotten your Obelisks upgraded, the hard part of earning Fractaline is done. From here on out, there's only one thing left to do if you haven't yet: connect the Obelisks to the Tower Obelisk, which you can do by picking up the four Obelisk Synchronization quests from it. Completing each of these is easy, as all you have to do is complete a Timelost Weapon Bounty from the Obelisk you're trying to connect. These bounties simply ask you to kill a couple of dozen enemies with a weapon of a specific element, and they reward you with one of the Season of Dawn weapons. Once you finish, the quest will automatically complete, and the Obelisk will be linked.
The reason this is important is that every week, the Tower Obelisk generates Polarized Fractaline for you to use based on how many Obelisks you've synchronized with it, and how high of a Resonance Rank each Obelisk has. At this point, all of your Obelisks should be maxed out at eleven, and once you connect them to the Tower Obelisk, it'll generate 4,600 Fractaline per week for you. If you choose to level up your Obelisks past eleven, you'll get even more Fractaline from the weekly generation.
And with that, you're done! You now have all the different sources of Fractaline available to you, and you'll be getting a ton of it from the Tower Obelisk and (hopefully) completing matchmaking activities. If you hit a stint of bad luck with the drop rate in activities, you can always do more bounties or hunt the Season of Dawn triumphs if you don't have them already (note that these can't be repeated). Now you should begin donating to the Empyrean Foundation, and in the weeks to come, you'll be able to deliver the 5,000 Fractaline needed for the emblem and triumph several times over, and as a result, be a massive help to the community.
Your thoughts
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Destiny 2 is free to play on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC. The latest expansion, Shadowkeep, is $35.
The Darkness has arrived
Shadowkeep is the latest Destiny 2 expansion, bringing players a terrifying new adventure against the Hive and sees the arrival of a mysterious, fear-inducing threat.
