When Fate of the Vaal first went live, the mechanic honestly felt like a deadweight once you hit early maps, and a lot of people, me included, were ready to walk away from it until players started testing the Holten setup and realised you could mix the usual currency grind with things like the preserved jawbone poe2 chase and suddenly the whole league opened up in a different way.
Rushing To Holten
The core of the strategy sits in Act 6 Holten, not in red maps, so you spin up a fast alt, usually a Ranger or anything that flies through the story, and you rush straight for the Act 6 interlude while keeping one thing in mind, you cannot let that character go past level 73 or the whole trick falls apart, because as long as you sit under 74, the Vaal pack spawns right by the waypoint almost every time and you just hop in, delete the pack, scoop the crystals, then sprint into the temple to intentionally die and bleed off the experience you just got so you do not accidentally level out of the sweet spot.
Why The Temple Feels So Good
On paper it sounds dumb, running in just to die over and over, but in practice you are generating a full temple in a couple of minutes and it starts to feel like a more focused version of the old quarry loops, only this time the rewards are tied to how smart you are with the room layout instead of how fast you can zone in and out, so the real game is not killing the pack, it is what you do with the crystals afterwards.
Building A Proper Snake Layout
Most people mess up the first few temples by spreading upgrades everywhere, and that just guts your returns, so you build one long chain, the classic Snake, starting from the entrance and running in a single clean path, then you slam Spymaster rooms early so you can grab medallions and lock in the layout before you accidentally break it, after that you lean hard on Garrisons and Armories to push monster effectiveness until you are well past 1000%, and once that number climbs, the difference is obvious, the room feels packed, the screen fills with rares, you start seeing raw Divine Orbs, exalts and level 84 bases often enough that you stop hovering every drop and just focus on movement.
Is This Just An Exploit
The community has argued about whether this counts as an exploit or just smart use of scaling rules, but right now the system is live, the developers are still on their holiday break, and the market is already warped by people chain running Holten temples for hours, so if you care about staying roughly in step with the economy and you do not feel like rolling an alt for suicide loops, some players simply stick to their main and handle mapping while grabbing extra currency on sites like u4gm to keep up with the folks no-lifing the Vaal setup.