Introduction: What is a Loot Filter
What is a loot filter? These tools usually allow to choose certain properties that will be highlighted if they happen to be on one of the item drops on the ground. The developers have stated that they want to avoid having a designated Loot Filter tool in Diablo 4 by fiddeling with existing systems to make it unnecessary. And indeed, the measures are working, have upsides and downsides. But the point of this thread is something else.
Currently in Diablo 4 there are rudimentary filters like the minimap icons, graphical effects with different colored beams, newly added icons for obols in Season 6, and a setting for Item Drop Sounds found in the options menu. The last one is to disable or enable the characteristic item type related sound, or to add an extra ambient sound loop when the players distance is not far away. These features are also loot filters. They are not powerful but immensly helpful regardless (at least some of them).
I thought about those settings and tried to come up with a basic loot filter, constructed after the existing options, so the chance to be accepted by the developers is higher. As a result, this still means no Affix filters, but I concluded it is allowed to select rarities the same way the item drop sounds work. This should do it.
This is not easy to describe. It is better to look at my image link for a quicker impression. For this mockup I took the āItem Drop Soundā section in the options menu as a basis. Summary:
- A new options category just called āItem Dropsā is added that replaces āItem Drop Soundsā. The listing for different loot types is kept: Weapons, Armor, Jewelry, Socketables, Others. Materials, Consumables etc can be added.
- Instead of the clunky minimum setting, each loot type gets a whole row of rarity checkboxes: ~6 boxes from white to purple (or more if available) with colorful presentation. The player can check or uncheck individually, select nothing or all boxes at once.
- A single bar setting (0-100) is added to increase the transparency of all unselected types, so that the player can adjust the visiblity of text panels for items on the ground. Zero means invisible or not displayed at all.
- The drop and ambient sounds are also here, working the exact same way like before, but with more customisation due to the checkbox matrix and through finetuning with a new volume bar (0-100).
This was the main part of my suggestion. The following additional quality of life suggestions for the checkboxes would be cool to have:
- Besides select and unselect, a checkbox could also be set to āAncestralā. Then the player will only see ancestral versions of unique equipment for example.
- Although I am not sure if it is the right thing to add, a feature that seems to fit in this suggestion is automatic salvaging or selling. Similar to point 5, it could be possible to set the checkboxes, so that unwanted loot is instantly replaced with mats and gold.
- The new icons for Season 6ās Obols are a very good addition, that hopefully gets expanded to other items. I think another column of checkboxes should allow the player to add Icons for different types. They are a helpful visual anchor for the eyes.
- Option to only send selected / checkboxed items to the stash. Non-ancestral legendary items are dropping the most in Diablo 4. At some point in progression I want to skip picking them up. But that means the stash is blocked after a minute of playing which is unpractical.
EDIT: I found this proposal about the issue, where you can check a box directly in the stash: https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/1inshn9/if_its_not_possible_to_have_a_kind_of_loot_filter/
Not related to checkboxes, but also a good fit for the new Item Drop section:
- If mousing over loot on the ground, it would be nice to have the tooltip displayed so that the player doesnt need to open the inventory.
I think these suggestions add very helpful customisation options for quicker loot identification and loot management. Please note, that it was intentional to not add affix filter options, as everything here needs to be acceptable and in line with the developers view on (overly powerful) loot filters. Therefore I aimed to achieve no more than the same benefits that the existing loot sound settings are trying to give players, but suggested it to also be visually and overall more complete.
Again, I recommend to check my image link above. The mockup turned out well, is easier to read and self-explanatory.