I jumped into the "Fate of the Vaal" footage expecting the usual grind: clear packs, pray for a spike, move on. Instead, it looks like PoE 2 is nudging us toward planning your own payday, especially if you're tracking PoE 2 Currency and trying not to fall behind early. The Temple Console is the big tell. It doesn't feel like a side feature; it feels like the point. You're not just running content, you're shaping it, picking where the value comes from rather than waiting for RNG to smile.
Building the run instead of rolling the dice
That's the hook: you can lay out rooms with intent. Need raw currency. You aim for spaces that pay out, then route your path so you're not wasting time backtracking. Need specific types of drops. Same deal, but you build around those rooms instead. In old PoE habits, people spam what's efficient and hope the market fills the gaps. Here, you'll probably feel the pressure to learn room combos fast, because the best players won't be "lucky," they'll be consistent.
Gold is back, but the old jackpots still matter
Gold dropping in chunky stacks changes the vibe immediately. It reads like a steady, understandable baseline alongside the usual barter-style currency. You can picture new players actually budgeting instead of staring at a tab of oddball orbs. But the footage also shows the classic adrenaline hit is still there. A loot filter lighting up a stack of five Exalted Orbs in a Treasury room is basically GGG saying, "Yeah, you can still high-roll." Gold might cover everyday costs, but the big orbs are still the headline wealth.
Runes and destructive extraction
The Rune system is the part that's going to mess with trade habits. Stuff like "Thane Myrk's Rune of Summer" looks tied to a bench-style socket upgrade, but the catch is brutal in a good way: to pull the Rune out, you destroy the item. That's a real sink. It makes "bad" drops feel worth checking again, because trash stats don't matter if the Rune is cracked. People will start pricing items for what you can extract, not what you can wear, and that's a whole new kind of shopping list.
Risk, scaling, and where the real profit sits
Once you start upgrading rooms to higher tiers, like pushing a Hall of War to Tier 3 for more pack size, you can see the endgame turning into a self-built pressure test. Add something like Commander's Headquarters, stack it with other modifiers, and suddenly rares are scary but lucrative. That gap—between "I can clear it" and "I can clear it fast without dying"—is where the smart money will be, and it'll shape the U4gm poe2 market in a way we haven't really dealt with before.