Writer based in London, UK. Several years writing guide coverage for some of the largest video game launches, with a focus on MMOs.
Feedback around the new Path Of Exile 2 The Fate Of The Vaal league has been varied, with plenty of praise for the new Druid class, but also a lot of players have been complaining about the new league mechanic, the Vaal Temple.
The premise is pretty simple: you build a temple over the course of multiple runs, stack room bonuses, defeat monsters, and get access to powerful upgrades throughout the campaign, including free exalts, quality increase, and gem modification. The new Path Of Exile 2 patch has made some positive changes to how it all works following player feedback.
More Rewards, Less Stress In The Vaal Temple
The patch notes (which you can read in full here) are fairly hefty, so I’ll just break down the most important parts. Fundamentally, rewards across Tier III rooms are being improved, with modifiers on the rooms doubled across the board from Tier I to Tier III.
“We could also try to expand our horizons and look into other regions, like possibly Russia, Italy, or South Korea.”
All the current Tier III rooms will now add extra modifiers to the temple, like more rare enemies, extra gold found, or more rare items. The aim here is to make the temple more worthwhile to complete while running the campaign, as many players have previously opted just to skip the temples because they take too long to complete with very few rewards.
Once you reach the endgame, the temple is still a core part of your character’s progression, but this has felt pretty poor in comparison to stacked abyssal maps with multiple tablets. The temple still just didn’t feel worthwhile.
However, two new Medallions are being added to the temple. The first will add a random Waystone Modifier that will last for ten temple runs, a bit like how tablets work for endgame maps. These are random and, as the patch notes state, could add very difficult modifiers for greater rewards.
The second Medallion will allow you to reroll the rooms available to you while using the temple console. This is a really neat one, as it should make getting the correct room combinations much easier. With the new rewards at Tier III, stacking your room bonuses and modifiers will become even more important.
Lastly, lots of players, myself included, were a little shocked to reveal just how much of the temple is removed after you defeat the Architect, and from general decay after use. To remedy this, GGG is halving the number of rooms that are destroyed after you defeat the Architect.
Rewards will also be more accessible, generally. Architect reward rooms can be placed in any adjacent room, not just paths (which was extremely frustrating) and the vault of uniques will now include more uniques as the temple level increases.
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So far, feedback about the patchnotes has been quite positive. Popular Path Of Exile 2 creator, Zizaran, states that while these changes do look good, there’s a bit of concern about all the rewards leaning towards only Tier III rooms.
Other players have come forward with their own suggestions, like making the temple available from your hideout rather than while you’re mapping, increasing general loot across the whole temple, and reducing the number of beacons you need to activate from six to three.
I expect this mechanic will continue to be tweaked as the league progresses. It’s a bit more involved than the previous league mechanics, like the abyssals, so it definitely seems to be more difficult to get right.
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