Destiny 2 – Umbral Engram’s guide in Season of Arrivals

Season of Arrivals has been with us for a few days now and we’re getting used to the new gameplay loop for getting loot in the new season. The main focus for getting this new loot is called Umbral engrams, which are engrams that have been touched by the Darkness and this season’s loo not only looks cool, but we have a whole load of options too. The following is a guide for Umbral engrams and how to use them to focus your loot and get specific drops you want in Season of Arrivals.

Umbral engrams are going to be the source of new loot in Season 11 and they not only grant us access to the new darkness weapons and armour but also legacy loot too. If you missed out on some of the great loot in previous seasons then you’ll be able to use Umbral engrams to get these awesome items of loot if that’s what you want to chase this season.

First up you’ll want to run through the main story quest in Season of Arrivals and Drifter will walk you through the process of gathering Umbral engrams and then using his new toy The Prismatic Recaster to focus the engrams and finally decoding them through the Decrypter.

This season Bungie has made it easier to get seasonal loot by adding Umbral engrams as rewards through the playlists, so it’s not only the seasonal activity (this season its Contact, which is currently available on Io) but you’ll also get these engrams to drop from Crucible, Strikes, Gambit and more.

There are 2 types of Umbral engrams – focused and unfocused. Unfocused engrams keep the loot pool nice and broad, like regular engrams, and they will drop anything from the Season 11 loot pool. However, the benefit of focusing the Umbral engrams allows you to narrow the loot pool and target farm-specific categories of loot. For example, when you start up you can focus on Season 11 weapons, armour, Shadowkeep legacy seasons and Gambit weapons which used to be reserved for Gambit Prime or the Reckoning.

In Drifters room, he has two new tools. The Prismatic Recaster, this allows you to focus your engrams and will be the tool that you will want to level up throughout the season to provide you more choice and more focus as the weeks go by. There’s also the Decrypter, which is where you turn in your loot once it’s been focused, or not. Think of the Decrypter like a Darkness Crytarch.

Let’s have a look at the Prismatic Recaster in a little more detail. On the home screen of the Recaster, you’ll see your rank, the Umbral Affinity options, the bounties and then rewards at the bottom. In the Umbral Affinity tab, you’ll see two options, Umbral Focusing and Gifts of Light and Dark.

Umbral Focusing allows you to focus engrams. Here you can choose Season 11 weapons, Season 11 armour and then a couple of options for legacy content. You’ll have a few free weekly focuses, but after that, it’s going to cost some currency to focus engrams. You’ll need something called Altered Element to focus and engram, costing 50 per engram. You can get Altered element from the daily bounties found on the Prismatic Recaster.

Gifts of Light and Dark are your rank up bonuses. You get one for free when you first go through the story mission with Drifter and you’ll want to pick and choose these wisely. The one on the right-hand side will give you a little boost each time, so make sure you add thank rank up bonus first. That’s called Umbral Mastery I.

The next thing to do is rank up the Prismatic Recaster. This will give you more focusing options as well as access to seasonal mods which will be really useful for builds, combined with the mods from the Seasonal Artifact. To rank up the recaster you’ll need another currency called Twisted Energy. This comes from the weekly recaster bounties and some items on the season pass. You can get more Twisted energy if you have more than one character as you can swap over to your other Guardians and do the weekly bounties there too. This time the weekly bounties aren’t too specific, which is a nice change from seasons gone by.

You’ll want to gather Umbral Engrams from out there in activities throughout the game. Contact, the new PVE event currently on Io, tends to be quite generous with Umbral Engrams. If you manage to complete a heroic version of the event, then you’ll get one at the end. I also found a few would drop on the floor, maybe one or two if you are very lucky through the heroic event. Once you have them, take them back to the recaster and focus your loot.

There’s some really nice loot this season including an auto rifle, fusion rifle, pulse rifle and a couple of swords. The swords are particularly good as one of them is a Caster frame, allowing you to damage enemies from a distance by casting out a blast from the sword. You can also get Season of Undying, Dawn and Worthy weapons here too. They don’t all seem to be available right now, but perhaps they will rotate later in the season. I did manage to get a Gnawing Hunger by focusing using the Gambit Engram focus option, which is very nice as this is one of the best autos in the game right now. This took me hours and hours of farming Tier III Reckoning before, so it’s nice to see this is a little easier to grind for this time.

Also, it’s worth noting that Umbral Engrams tend to drop above your power level, so it’s a good way to level up towards 1050. This is going to be good for accessing end game content like the Dungeon in Season of Arrivals.

As always, let me know what you think down in the comments. What loot have you been getting from your Umbral engrams, and what’s your favourite new weapons and armour in Season of Arrivals?

That’s it for this guide for Umbral engrams and how to use them to focus your loot and get specific drops you want in Season of Arrivals. For more Destiny 2 content like this check out the Shadowkeep Guide or check out the YouTube Channel.