Path of Exile 2’s New Vaal Temples Are Already Getting Exploited
Action RPGs like Diablo and Path of Exile are famous for letting players push game systems to their limits. Sometimes that means discovering broken skill combos. Other times it means finding loopholes the developers clearly did not plan for.
Path of Exile 2’s 0.4 update introduced a complex new endgame activity called Vaal Temples. It is meant to be a long term, build your own dungeon system that you gradually upgrade while running maps. Players jump in, experiment, and usually just try to squeeze out more loot.
But a few clever players have already found a way to turn Vaal Temples into a fast farming machine that skips most of the intended grind.
What Vaal Temples Are Supposed To Be
Vaal Temples are a side activity you encounter while running endgame maps. Think of them as customizable dungeons. As you play maps, you find and place different room types inside your temple. Over time, you shape it into a high value loot run tailored to your goals.
In theory, it works like this:
- You run maps in the endgame.
- Every so often you encounter a Vaal Temple opportunity.
- You add or upgrade rooms in your temple, following some pretty arcane rules.
- Once the temple is fully built, you run it for big rewards.
The catch is that it takes time. You might spend hours running maps, praying for the right room types and placements. The system is so complex that players have already made detailed cheatsheets just to explain how to arrange rooms for maximum profit.
Many in the community feel torn about it. On one hand, the rewards can be excellent if you set everything up correctly. On the other, a lot of players just want to blast monsters and pick up loot without dealing with a mini puzzle game bolted onto their endgame.
Grinding Gear Games has already stepped in once to buff the rewards and make the mode less punishing. Even after those changes, Vaal Temples remain divisive.
The Low Level Character Exploit
That is where the new exploit comes in. Streamer Fubgun and a few others have discovered a way to bypass the slow, map based progression Vaal Temples are built around.
The method relies on keeping a character at a low level during the campaign instead of progressing naturally into the endgame:
- There is a specific campaign map that always spawns a Vaal Temple entrance in the same spot.
- By intentionally staying low level, you can reach that map and repeatedly reset it.
- Each reset gives you another chance to upgrade and build your Vaal Temple extremely quickly.
Instead of spending hours clearing different endgame maps and hoping the right content appears, this approach lets you spam the same layout in minutes. It effectively turns the elaborate long term temple system into a rapid fire farming loop.
The tradeoff is that only low level characters can benefit from this exact setup. Higher level characters cannot access the same rewards this way, so you are not just instantly turbo charging your main. You would need to deliberately start a fresh character, keep it weak on purpose, and use it as a temple building tool.
For many players that is too much hassle. But in a game like Path of Exile, where optimization is a core part of the appeal, this strategy is extremely attractive to anyone who loves squeezing every drop of value out of the systems. The loot you generate can still help your main characters, whether through gear upgrades or valuable crafting materials.
What This Says About Path of Exile 2’s Design
On the surface, this looks like a harmless quirk. It is not exactly deleting bosses in one hit or destroying the game economy overnight. That is probably why the exploit has survived so far, especially with the developers on a holiday break and not actively pushing emergency fixes.
Still, it clearly goes against what Grinding Gear Games intended for Vaal Temples. The system is supposed to be a long form endgame project that slowly builds up as you map. Dying on purpose to stay underleveled and spamming a single campaign zone is the exact opposite of that fantasy.
More importantly, the fact that players are willing to go to these lengths reveals a deeper issue. When a mode is so random and demanding that people rebuild characters just to bypass its clunkier elements, it suggests the underlying design may need more work.
Players are essentially saying: the idea is cool, but the path to getting rewarding temples feels too tedious or too reliant on luck. Instead of engaging with the system as intended, they are bending the rules to get to the good part as fast as possible.
Expect this particular strategy to be patched out once the full team at Grinding Gear Games is back and actively tuning Path of Exile 2 again. The studio has a long history of closing exploits while also iterating on systems that feel off. Vaal Temples will likely get more adjustments before they become a permanent, polished part of the game.
For now, though, the exploit is a perfect snapshot of what makes games like Path of Exile so fascinating to watch. Give players a complex new toy, and they will not just play with it. They will try to break it, rebuild it, and then turn the pieces into the most efficient loot machine they can imagine.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/action-rpg-players-will-exploit-anything-in-the-name-of-efficiency-which-is-why-path-of-exile-2-players-are-locking-themselves-in-the-campaign-for-profit/
