If you have been ignoring the new Path of Exile 2 league, you might not realise just how wild things have got with the Fate of the Vaal mechanic, especially once people worked out how to bend it around the campaign flow with the Holten reset strat and how it compares with simply stacking loot or picking up cheap poe 2 currency from outside the game. The original design looks like a slow, slightly fiddly side system during the story, then turns into a bit of a slog in maps, so most players just shrugged and went back to T16s. Then Fubgun showed that parking yourself in the Act 6 Holten interlude, staying under the level penalty, and chaining resets lets you drown in crystals faster than any ordinary mapping setup could ever do.
Why Holten Farming Took Over
The trick feels simple once you have seen it, but playing it out is kind of degenerate and that is why it works. You roll a fresh char, sprint the campaign to Holten, and do your best to keep your level under 74 so the Vaal packs keep spawning right next to the waypoint. When exp gets too close, people just face‑plant into Atziri or let a big pack inside the temple delete them to drop a level. It sounds dumb on paper, but in practice you are clearing a full temple's worth of crystals in a couple of minutes, over and over, while someone running six juiced T16s is still trying to piece together one average layout and wondering where their profit went.
The "Snake Method" Temple Setup
What really shifts it from good to broken is how people are building their temples. Instead of clicking rooms at random and hoping for the best, players have started using a "Snake Method", laying out one long chain from the entrance that winds all the way to the back. Along that path you stack Spymaster rooms for medallions and Garrison rooms for effectiveness, basically turning every extra node into more multipliers on monster packs rather than side content that does not pay out. Tools like the Atziri Temple Editor help plan that path so you do not paint yourself into a corner, and the key is locking the tail of the snake with medallions so destabilisation cannot eat the rooms you care about.
Loot Pressure And The League Economy
When the temple is built like that, you start to see why people keep throwing around numbers like "100 divines an hour" without sounding totally delusional. The density gets silly, loot explosions start to feel like old Beyond memes, and you see drops that would normally be screen‑shot moments just lying on the floor: raw divines, mirror tier stuff, a pile of ilvl 84 bases that all look craftable. Veteran players look at it and think of old Harbour Bridge farming in PoE 1, while newer folks watch crystal prices crash and wonder if they are already too late. Raw currency is inflating, trade chat feels different, and normal mapping looks worse every day the strat stays untouched.
Whether You Grind Or Swipe
Nobody knows how long GGG will let this sit, and with the holiday timing there is a decent chance it lives long enough for a lot of people to cash out, but it will not last forever and that is part of why players feel pushed to either dive into the Holten treadmill or ignore it on purpose. Some enjoy the optimisation puzzle and do not mind suiciding to Atziri all night, others just want to log in, run maps, maybe buy a couple of upgrades from a place like u4gm and focus on builds instead of temple routing. Both approaches are floating around right now, and whichever way you lean, this league is one of those rare moments where the economy, the content and the community drama all crash into each other at once.
