Early days of Fate of the Vaal in Path of Exile 2 have been rough for a lot of players, and if you tried to interact with the temple system in maps you probably bounced off it fast, even if the rewards teased you with the promise of poe2 cheap divine orbs, because building a full temple off high tier maps felt like busywork more than anything else.

How The Holten Loop Actually Works

The whole mood changes once you see what people are doing in Act 6 Holten, and you try it yourself for twenty minutes instead of just scrolling past clips on Reddit, because that fixed Vaal pack that spawns near the waypoint lets you farm crystals in a way that completely ignores the usual six-map setup loop, as long as your character is not more than ten levels above the zone so you park an alt around level 70, zone in, sprint to the pack, delete the rares, scoop the crystals and then hop back to character select to reset the area.

Most folks just make a low level ranger or Amazon, throw on a couple of levelling uniques and movement speed boots, and build them purely for clearing that tiny circle fast, with no real concern for their campaign progress, and if the XP gain starts creeping you too close to the level cap you just step into a temple, run at Atziri and let her one-shot you a few times to bleed off exp so the Holten pack keeps spawning at full value, which feels a bit wrong on paper but in practice it is just another ARPG optimisation puzzle.

Building A Profitable Snake Temple

Stacking crystals is only half of the story though, because the real money is in how you spend them inside the temple grid, and that is where the so-called Snake Method comes in, where instead of lighting up random rooms all over the map you plan one long single path from the entrance, with every new room chaining off the last one so you push effectiveness higher and higher until you hit four digits and the whole instance starts throwing currency at you.

Players often pull up a community-made Atziri Temple Editor in a browser or on a second monitor, sketch a route with early Spymaster rooms so they can lock in the layout and not accidentally break the chain, and then weave in Garrison rooms and a few choice reward nodes so that by the time the snake reaches the final chamber the whole thing is sitting at something like 1000 percent effectiveness, which turns even basic monsters into loot pinatas that can throw out raw divine orbs, exalts and level 84 bases that are perfect for endgame crafting or flipping on trade.

Economy Shock And What Players Are Doing

The impact on the league economy is already obvious to anyone trading a lot, with crystal prices dropping hard and high-end bases showing up in bulk, and most people assume that once the holiday lull ends, GGG will either change the Holten spawn rules or add some kind of level lock to crystal generation, so there is a weird pressure to decide if you want to squeeze value out of the method now, keep ignoring it on principle, or just lean into playing your main and pick up a few extra upgrades from a site like u4gm if you would rather skip the alt setup dance and focus on trying out those big, expensive builds while they still feel fresh this league.