Ask a Path of Exile 2 player about the in-game economy a few months ago and you're guaranteed to hear a lot of complaints about a currency farming strategy involving a temple. The loot was simply too good in the action RPG's newest activity and anyone who skipped it was completely priced out of buying gear for their characters.
Even though developer Grinding Gear Games issued a list of nerfs to the mechanic for the newest league, or season, it wasn't enough to stop clever players from figuring out how to make bank with temples once again. But after just a few hours of people exploiting them, the studio dropped in with heavy nerfs to its output.
"Unfortunately we are going to need to reduce some of the juicing that is possible with the Temple fairly substantially," Grinding Gear Games wrote on X before releasing the hotfix.
Like many seasonal action RPG studios, Grinding Gear Games generally tries to leave things as they are until the next season so players don't feel like they wasted their time, but something this catastrophic had to go as soon as possible. This is why most of the replies to the post are thankful for the studio's quick response.
The temple system is pretty complex, but it helps if you think about it like a card game. You're dealt a hand of cards representing rooms you can place in your temple. Each of them have different rules for where you can place them and the goal is to connect them in just the right way to juice the rewards they give. Each time you finish running through your temple like a dungeon, a few rooms get deleted. But there was a specific layout you could do that kept this from happening to the most valuable rooms.
Using that method would net you the equivalent of thousands of dollars in Path of Exile currency items. Normally, you'll find a couple Divine Orbs (essentially a $100 dollar bill) over the course of a few hours. With the right temple strategy, however, Divine Orbs could start raining down from the sky, turning you into a millionaire overnight. Once you have a few hundred players doing this prices start inflating and everything falls apart.
Not this time though. Grinding Gear Games saved Path of Exile 2's biggest update yet from becoming its second most disastrous update yet. It's not often you see players applauding nerfs, but in a game with an economy this integral to the experience, nobody wants to see unintended interactions ruining the fun.
