In the early days of Fate of the Vaal, a lot of players were running the same old red maps, trying to squeeze out profit and feeling like the whole thing was a slow job rather than a game, even people who decided to poe 2 currency buy felt the pacing was off. Then the Holten reset tech started doing the rounds, and suddenly the league flipped. Instead of crawling through T16s, you park a fresh alt in the Act 6 Holten interlude, keep that character under level 74, and you get Vaal packs spawning practically on your doorstep. You zone in, sprint a few steps, delete the pack, loot your crystals, and reset. The only real "cost" is that you need to deliberately die inside the temple once your XP creeps too high, just to keep the level locked where the spawns stay busted.
The Holten Loop
Running this loop feels pretty scuffed at first. You are not progressing your atlas, you are not chasing bosses, you are just farming the same short stretch over and over. But you very quickly see why people are doing it. A low-level Amazon or similar twink, with a half-decent weapon and some movespeed, can chain these instances non-stop. No real mechanics to think about, barely any danger, and the crystal income snowballs fast. In an hour or so, you are sitting on enough materials to build out temples for the rest of the night, while someone grinding standard maps in the "intended" way might still be staring at a half-finished layout.
Building The Snake
Where it really gets silly is when you start using those crystals properly. Throwing rooms randomly on the 9x9 feels ok at first, but you notice you are leaving value on the table. The strong play is to build a long, continuous "snake" path from the entrance, so you are chaining as many multipliers as possible on a single run. You focus on Spymaster rooms to grab medallions and lock in good rolls, then add Garrisons to push effectiveness even higher. A lot of players plan this out with an Atziri Temple editor tool, because once you have a clean snake, you are seeing monster pack effectiveness numbers jump into the four digits. When that happens, the whole screen just vomits currency, and weaker machines literally stutter when the loot hits the floor.
Impact On The League Economy
The knock-on effect is that Fate of the Vaal's economy starts to warp around this one trick. Crystals that were pricey at league start slide hard, since anyone willing to run a sacrificial Holten alt can generate them in bulk. Divine Orbs and other high-end drops feel cheaper in practice because so many players are effectively printing them through juiced temples. You see level 70 characters with gear that would normally belong on a ladder pusher weeks into the season. It does not feel like traditional RMT-level cheating, but it does expose how fragile the reward scaling is when a single under-tuned zone lines up with a powerful endgame system.
Short Window To Cash In
No one really expects this to survive untouched once the dev team is back in the office. Maybe the spawn position changes, maybe the drops get capped, or they just adjust how experience and instability interact in that area. Until then, you have a brief window where rolling an alt, grinding Holten and chaining temples is basically the meta if you care about profit. If you hate the idea of suicide-farming or just do not have the time to mess with it, there is always the option to buy currency and skip the grind entirely through a site like U4GM, where players grab game currency and items and then jump straight into the fun parts of the league.
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