Hi there! o/
This cycle’s additions to item filters are absolutely amazing, and I love how many more tools for item filtering we seem to be getting.
As someone who likes to make her own item filter from scratch, I have a few suggestions I would like to make:
- Allow the creation of separators to make navigation in the filter easier
My filter currently has a total of 114 rules, with 43 of them being dedicated to exalted items, and only 8 of them to idols. This means that, when scrolling through my filter’s rules to find those dedicated to idols, I need to scroll through a lot of exalted item rules to find the ones I’m looking for.
To help with that, I made some rules that are made to catch no item at all (normal items with at least 1LP), whose name is something like “------ EXALTED ITEMS ------”, that act as separators to make scrolling easier.
While this is a nice bandaid solution (that I recommend to anyone with large filters, by the way! 
), I think that having actual separators would be helpful for a few reasons:
- They could be made to stand out from filter rules, e.g. by being a little taller than them, not having a rule number to the left of their labels, giving them a more visible font, allowing the recoloring of their labels, etc.
Here is a quick picture showing what my current separators look like (bottom one, “Rare bases”), and what they would look like with a slightly taller label, no rule filter number/toggle, and a solid bar next to the text instead of many dash characters (top one, “Items to shatter”). - Having dedicated separators would reduce the performance impact of filters that use separators, as the only way to make a separator currently is to create a rule, which will inevitably be run on items that drop.
Overall, I believe this would make navigating large filters a lot easier.
- Allow the sorting of item filter rules into rule groups that can be collapsed or expanded to make navigation easier
Taking my previous point a little further, filter navigation could also be made a lot easier if, instead (or as well as) having separators, rules could be organised in rule groups. For instance, a rule group for exalted item rules, a rule group for idol rules, etc.
Such rule groups could either be shown with their header visually acting as a separator (perhaps shifted to the left a little bit compared to actual filter rules, so it is clear that they are “folders” that contain rules, the same way that sub-folders are shown shifted to the right of their parent folder in the Windows file explorer?), or clicked on to collapse the rules they contain.
Instead of having large filters showing all their rules at once, players could, depending on their preference:
- Use filter group labels as separators visually,
- Collapse all rule groups, so they would only see the group names, and then expand the rule group(s) they want to work on,
- Or anything in between, e.g. only collapse large rule groups.
This would be even more useful for filter navigation than the visual separator concept I mentioned in 1., but this would definitely require more work, so I’d like to say that, while I would love to have the filter group concept I just mentioned, even “just” the separator concept from 1. would already make navigation a whole lot easier.
- Allow players to see what item filter rule an item in their inventory was caught by
After an echo (or a few echoes, I always procrastinate putting loot in my stash :p), I tend to forget what filter rule the items I picked up were caught by. Was that item shown in green, which means I need to shatter it? Was it shown in purple, meaning it’s a decent exalted base as it is? Was it shown in blue, which means that, while it’s not a good base, it has a T7 and a free prefix, which means I can try to Rune of Havoc a +4 onto it?
I know people in the past have mentioned showing a colored border around items in the inventory to show what color items would look like on the ground, and, if I remember correctly, it was said that this would be too impactful performance-wise.
So, another, potentially less resource-intensive solution could perhaps be to give players the option to show more information on an item when pressing Alt (or a dedicated keybind):
- A first option would be to show what the item label would look like, if the item were to drop, somewhere on the item card (below the 2D art of items, maybe?), using the short item label (i.e. “Refuge Gloves” and not “Frosted Refuge Gloves of Skill”).
- A second option would be to show the name of the item filter rule that caught the item. I don’t know if this would be feasible in a UI-friendly way, since filter rule names can be a bit long, and showing user-typed text on the window that shows an item’s stats could make it seem a bit “out of place”, but this would be even more informative and clear than the first option.
While this could be very useful, this would also mean quite a bit of extra visual information being shown (though only when pressing a specific keybind), but I personally feel like it could have its place as an opt-in option to be turned on in the settings.
- Default color of map icons
I’m not entirely sure of this one, so if I’m not correct, please let me know and I’ll delete this point. ^^
If I’m not mistaken, the default color of map icons currently doesn’t fit the color of the item’s label as set in the filter rule. I think the default color of the map icon fits the color that the item’s label would be without the rule (e.g. purple for exalted items, yellow for rare, etc.).
It would be really nice if the default color of the map icon would fit the color that the filter rule chooses for the item’s label.
However, I know that the color selection for map icons is more restricted than the color selection for item labels, which brings me to the next suggestion:
- Expanding the color palette and shape selection for map icons
Having more colors to choose from for map icons would be great - at minimum, I would love to have every color that can be chosen as an item label color, so the map icon color for an item could be made to match the color of its label (which, as I said in 4., I think would be a good default behavior).
On top of color selection, it would be really nice to have a choice of a few different map icons to choose from.
To whoever may be reading this: thank you for reading, and I hope you have a nice day <3