Fate of the Vaal League Guide

Introduction

Path of Exile 2’s 0.4 patch features the game’s second full League: “Fate of the Vaal”. This league adds Vaal Beacons to each zone, allowing you to access the Temple of Atziri. As you visit the Temple, you’ll build your own dungeon room-by-room, upgrade them to be more rewarding, and find new Bosses, Uniques, and crafting methods!

This is a Pre-Launch Guide, as the Fate of the Vaal League is not yet live. This guide is based on publicly available information about Fate of the Vaal through reveals, teasers, Q&A, developer comments, etc, and will continue to be updated up through—and after—league launch. As such, information in this guide may be inaccurate, or simply changed by GGG prior to launch.

Accessing the Temple

In each zone in the game, you will encounter a Vaal Beacon. Similar to the Abyss, these Beacons will empower nearby monsters with corruption. Slaying all of these corrupted monsters will power up the Beacon; once you’ve done this six times, a portal to the Temple will appear, allowing you to begin your exploration.

Vaal Beacons

In addition to corrupting nearby monsters, Vaal Beacons will sometimes spawn additional monsters. Rarely, they will even spawn a rare or boss monster – so watch out!

At endgame, you can stack up to 10 temples at a time before entering and running your Temple, allowing you to just grind out Waystones, and run your Temples at your leisure!

The Past Temple

Once you’ve reached a certain point in the game (presumably, Act 4), you’ll be able to access a new version of the Temple by time-traveling into the past. The Past Temple has additional Rooms and Rewards, and allows you to fight two new Bosses: The Royal Architect, and Atziri herself!

The Temple of Atziri

Once inside the Temple, you’ll find a control console that allows you to view and modify the temple layout. This is effectively you building the zone you’re about to run through and kill monsters in. Each room represents different types of monsters, rewards, and even modifiers that apply to the entire Temple!

Running the Temple

Once you’ve placed your Rooms, you can Run the Temple. The Paths between Rooms will be filled with monsters, and When you enter a Room, the entrance will seal behind you… until you kill whatever Rare or Unique monsters are inside.

Building the Temple

Each time you access the Temple, you’ll be given six Rooms you can place on a grid. These Rooms include Halls that allow you to travel throughout the temple, and a variety of named Rooms that contain monsters, Bosses, rewards, or modify the Temple in various ways!

Before you Run the Temple, you place these rooms as you wish on a grid. Each Hall must connect to an existing room in a way that is valid – the Halls must connect. Reward rooms can only be accessed if they are connected to a path leading into them – be sure to plan out your paths carefully!

Temple Decay

After you Run the Temple, the Temple will decay, destroying several Rooms at random. This random decay can absolutely ruin your carefully constructed dungeon… or it could leave your best Rewards untouched!

Carefully reconstructing your Temple as it decays is the key to getting the most powerful rewards again, and again, and again…

Upgrading Rooms

While Rooms inherently add monsters and/or rewards to the Temple, the very best rewards come from higher Tier rooms. Each Room has a modifier that applies to the entire temple, and these modifiers become incredibly powerful at Tier 3!

Each non-Hall room can have its Tier upgraded if its conditions are met. These mostly involve having specific Rooms adjacent to them. Each Room has its conditions for being upgraded listed in its tooltip.

When placing rooms, locations that will cause a Room to be upgraded will be highlighted in bright green, making it easy to tell what your best options are.

Tier 3 Crafting Rewards

Some Tier 3 Rooms will have crafting devices as rewards. These devices add powerful new crafting options to the game, including the ability to double corrupt items!

You don’t need to worry about bringing the item with you or finding a strange way to sell these crafting devices to other players, however. Each of these crafting devices can be itemized into a currency orb you can take with you to use later… or to sell on the Currency Exchange!

Known Tier 3 Room Rewards

Corruption Altar

Currency Items: Architect’s Orb, Crystallized Corruption

The Corruption Altar allows you corrupt a corrupted item for a second time – causing it to become Twice Corrupted.

This process is incredibly dangerous – it has a 50% chance to outright destroy the item. But the upside of getting an item with two corruption outcomes is worth it, if you can afford the risk.

Transcension Device

The Transcension Device allows you to replace one of your limbs with a mechanical version. These mechanical versions grant random, passive modifiers… but are lost upon death.

As long as you don’t die, this is just a permanent, passive boost – especially if you replace all four limbs!

Juatalotli’s Triumph

Currency Item: Vaal Cultivation Orb

This device allows you to modify corrupted Unique items. The effect depends on whether or not the Unique is Vaal-themed, or not.

For non-Vaal Uniques, the Unique is replaced with a random corrupted Unique of the same Item Class.

For Vaal Uniques, however… up to two modifiers are replaced with random modifiers. This process is completely random – any modifiers can be replaced, and any modifiers from the pool of available modifiers can be picked.

The pool of potential modifiers includes generic modifiers, new modifiers specific to this crafting method, and new modifiers that are Unique-specific and can only roll on specific Uniques.

Due to the incredibly random nature of this crafting method, it will be possible to create some incredibly powerful items – if you remove bad modifiers or downsides and replace them with powerful new modifiers. But… it will also be possible to create truly useless items, by removing the modifier that makes the Unique desirable in the first place!

Corrupted Precursor Machine

Currency Item: Ancient Infuser

This device allows you to corrupt a Tablet. These corrupted tablets can gain additional uses… or even additional modifiers, allowing you to have tablets with more than four modifiers!

Kishara’s Acquisition

Currency Item: Orb of Extraction

This device allows you to destroy a piece of equipment, recovering the socketables inside it.

Jiquani’s Triumph

Currency Item: Core Destabiliser

This device allows you to modify Soul Cores into new types of Soul Cores. How exactly this works—and the potential outcomes—are currently unknown.

The Royal Architect

The Royal Architect is a special Boss Room that exists in the Past version of the Temple. Creating pathways to the Room will allow you to fight this Boss.

In addition to new Uniques and Lineage Supports, defeating the Royal Architect will allow you to place exclusive, special reward rooms in your Temple. This includes the Royal Access Chamber, which allows you fight Atziri herself.

However, this comes at a cost – defeating the Architect will cause a HUGE portion of your Temple to decay, meaning you’ll lose out on the reward rooms you’ve built up.

Queen Atziri

Once you’ve defeated the Architect and rebuilt the Temple, you’ll be able to fight Atziri herself, in a new Pinnacle Boss fight.

Similar to the Royal Architect, defeating Atziri will cause your Temple to Decay, and you’ll need to defeat the Architect in order to fight Atziri again.

Vaal Siphoner

Atziri can drop a new crafting item called the Vaal Siphoner. This currency item can be used on a corrupted rare Ring or Amulet.

This adds a kill threshold to the equipment, and when that threshold is met, a random modifier will be removed, and the values of all remaining modifiers will be increased.