Reading this thread is taking a long time, but I don’t think you need full exotic
The group I was with (those guys were awesome ^^) got through fractals 2 and only tow of us were legit 80s, and one of them dc’ed long before the end. I was (at the time) only level 26.
I’d say the hardest parts were that robot that you have to spill the lava on and figuring out how to kill the eldritch abomination/squid thing, because there was no guide at the time that we did it. I’m glad I wound up with a bunch of smart, funny gamers though because we sussed everything out quite quickly.
It was hella fun