When Fate of the Vaal went live in Path of Exile 2, a lot of players bounced off the league mechanic pretty fast, even though on paper it sounded like easy profit and a good way to stack poe 2 currency during early maps.

How The Holten Loop Actually Works

If you have not been glued to Twitch or Reddit, the Holten trick sounds like nonsense at first. You go back to Act 6, into that small interlude area, and there is a Vaal pack sitting almost on top of the waypoint every single time. The catch is you have to keep the character under the level cap for the zone, so you are parking alts around level 70 to 73 and just running a tight loop. Load in, sprint a few steps, delete the rares, scoop the crystals, hit escape, repeat. No wandering around the campaign, no six map investment per temple, just ten second laps that feel more like speedrunning than mapping.

Managing Levels And Building Temples

The annoying bit is keeping your alt from dinging out of the bracket. After a while the XP creeps up, so people just throw themselves into Atziri inside the temple and let her wipe them to lose progress. It is grim, but it works and it is faster than rolling a new character. Once you have a stash tab full of crystals, the real money comes from how you lay out the temple. Instead of filling in random rooms, you build that long snake path from the entrance, bending it around the grid so every room in the chain is linked and juiced. It looks scuffed when you first try it, which is why a lot of players use community planners or editors to sketch it before burning crystals.

Why The Snake Method Prints Divines

Most of the value comes from stacking room effectiveness and locking in the right types. Spymaster rooms feed you medallions so you do not accidentally ruin the layout later, and Garrison nodes crank up the effectiveness until you are seeing four digits on the bar. You run that kind of temple with a half decent mapper, maybe a Lightning Arrow Deadeye or any build that clears off screen, and the floor is just covered in raw divines, random exalts and high item level bases that you can flip or craft. Players are reporting numbers like fifty divines in under an hour without even perfect gear, and while that is not going to be everyone's result, it is miles better than the normal slow grind through red maps.

Patch Risk And What To Do Right Now

There is no way this sits untouched for long, because the impact on crystal prices and the whole Vaal economy is already obvious, and once GGG is back from the holiday break they will probably kill the Holten spawn or hard lock the crystal drops by level. If you like this kind of thing, it is worth parking an alt now and learning the loop before that happens, and if you hate campaign resets or just want to push a main character straight into big builds and endgame, a lot of people quietly lean on services like u4gm when they want to buy game currency or items and skip the whole process.