The much-discussed Path of Exile 2 Early Access recently released its first major update, Patch 0.2.0 Dawn of the Hunt, which adds a new crafting tool – Fracturing Orbs, which will lock one of the rare items with four or more modifiers, and lock it to the item permanently.
This means that this modifier cannot be removed by POE 2 Chaos Orbs or Orbs of Annulment, nor can it be modified by Divine Orbs, which is very useful for those who want to rely on a key item to focus on the benefits it brings.
In view of this, this guide will give you a detailed introduction to POE 2 Fracturing Orbs, how to obtain this important crafting tool, and how to use it, so that you can effectively farm it in the game and maximize its role.
Overview
Fracturing Orbs are a common addition to POE 2, but because Essences work differently in both games, they are actually less effective in POE 2 than in the original.
Fracturing Shards that make up these Orbs in POE 1 are rarely dropped from Harbinger mechanic, and twenty of them will combine to form a complete Orb.
Fortunately, According to the recent announcement by GGG, Fracturing Orbs will be more common and can be farmed as a target in POE 2. However, the areas where they can be generated have changed a bit, and you can now find them in new drops closer to Atlas.
How To Get Fracturing Orbs?
As just mentioned, Fracturing Orbs are related to certain areas in the Atlas, which are called corruption biomes. You will see six maps with red Corrupted icons on Atlas on your monitor, and a seventh map in the center with a brighter Corrupted icon.
In this center map there is a special boss encounter with Corrupted mechanic, and after you defeat it, the other monsters in the corrupted biome will be transformed into cleansed biomes, and some new monsters will appear.
You will find a Fracturing Orb in the process of clearing cleansed biomes, but this requires a lot of luck. In the developer’s announcement, you can learn that there is about one Fracturing Orb in each corrupted biome, so your method and strategy for farming this important crafting tool is to rush directly to the biome boss you need to challenge.
But it should be noted that you not only need to pay a lot of opportunity costs in this, but you also would better buy POE 2 Currency at IGGM.com to enhance your offensive and defensive capabilities in the boss encounter so that you can complete the challenge in one go.
How To Use It?
Generally speaking, Fracturing Orbs are best used on Rare POE 2 Items, because they have four distinct modifiers and one of them can provide you with a delightful bonus. On top of that, they are not complete.
The advice here is to spend as much POE 2 Currency as possible in the game to get two very good non-fragmented modifiers, and then use Fracturing Orbs to lock one of them so that you can always get a large bonus from it.
In addition, you can also use another item to maximize the effectiveness of these orbs, that is Omens. Although its drop rate has been doubled in the current POE 2 Patch 0.2.0, you can still not find it in the loot of monsters below level 80, which means that you can only farm it in Tier 16 maps or those with Corrupted or Irradiated.
Generally speaking, Orb of Annulment can remove any modifier from an item, whether you need it or not. So when you apply it to an item with 2 prefixes and 3 suffixes, the orb has a 20% chance to remove any specific modifier.
But if the item is already fractured, the chance to remove any specific non-locked modifier becomes 25%, and the chance to remove locked modifiers becomes 0%. What if you want to lock one of the first two prefixes but accidentally use Omen of Sinistral Annulment?
This is where Omen’s Isolation Principle comes into play, which prohibits Annulment from removing suffixes, and Fracturing Orbs prohibits it from removing locked prefixes. In this case, four of the five modifiers are prohibited, so Annul can only remove the fifth or the unimportant affix.
While Omen of Sinistral Annulment currently only removes one unwanted prefix from a one-prefix, three-suffix item so that you can add a new modifier to it, by combining it with Fracturing Orbs, it can also do this for two-prefix, three-suffix items.
Alternatively, you can use an alternative to these Omens – Omen of Whittling, which may be more effective than left/right Annul omens in removing unwanted modifiers in certain situations. However, it is important to note that they are just an alternative to consider, and do not mean that they will work well with Fracturing Orbs.
The above is the detailed introduction of the new crafting tool Fracturing Orbs in the current POE 2 Patch 0.2.0 Dawn of the Hunt, as well as the farming method and usage. Because it is really precious, you should bring it to the endgame content as much as possible so that you can get a greater improvement from it. I wish you a happy game!
