The loot filter is good. But only good. We can make it better.
If you have multiple rules particularly governing sets of desirable affixes, and you want to change the affix list for whatever reason, you have to alter each of the rules that are using the list of the affixes.
Story time.
You create a spellblade in HC. You set up a rule list for what you think are the useful stats you want to use. You make a “MY LIGHTNING SPELLBLADE” filter for your run.
You have a L1->L15, L16->L30, L31->L50, L51->L65, L65->L80, and a L80+ rule for the total number of acceptable tiers for your desired affixes at various levels. You set up the single list initially, copied it 5 times. It was easy.
Your HC spellblade dies at 99! OH NO But you learned a lot of lessons about how you want to play it and you make another to go for 100!
One of the lessons you learned on your last run is that you want to remove/add some affixes into/out of the filter… you’ve decided when you play your spellblade this time around, you don’t want %dodge or +dodge any more, or dex, you’d rather stack int and ward stats. You have to alter 6 separate rules to make that change for the new spellblade you want to make.
The issue:
Any decision, impacting a commonly used rule set, results in X times the amount of effort to maintain where X is the number of rules utilising the same set of selections. This makes the loot filter FAR more unwieldy and frustrating to use. Want a fancy all encompassing loot filter? Well, there is no such thing as a minor tweak any more. Everything is frickin’ LABOUR.
Large complex configurations should be modularised so that repeated actions like in this example are not necessary. In this case, a player should be allowed to create an “affix group” definition. This is a list of affixes that only need be defined ONCE, that any filter rule is allowed to use. If the player wishes to alter the affix list in their “HC LIGHTNING SPELLBLADE” affix group for their next run, they only need to remove the dodge or whatever from the affix list defined in the affix group. This then cascades into all of the rules in all of the filters that use the HC LIGHTNING SPELLBLADE affix group, automatically updating all 6 rules in MY LIGHTNING SPELLBLADE FILTER
The conclusion is that individual affix lists are not something that the player should be forced to make and maintain individually on a rule-by-rule basis.
Maybe your next spellblade dies at 98. OMG YOU’RE GETTING WORSE.
Maybe this time you want to switch from a lightning loadout to a cold one? Note that copying the filter doesn’t help. Without an affix group this would put you in the situation where you have all of the secondary parts of the rules in place but now you have to fix 6 affix lists.
So the alternative is to alter the affix list of one of the rules, but now you’ll also need to copy that single cold rule and then mimic the additional rules from the other lightning rules (like level ranges) within the filter - applying the different bits into the new cold rules and deleting the lightning ones. This raises another idea about having an optional “default affix group”, definable at filter level which would further modularise it.
Request:
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Add an affix group creation option to the loot filter that can create lists that can applied across all filters and rules, and maintained in a single location. This could apply to any/all lists really, (item type, uniques) but affixes is the largest and most diverse so is by far the worst offender.
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I’d envisage “default affix groups” working at filter level, and rules having in the affix group selection an option for “use default affix group” in addition to the specific affix groups. That way you could have your MY LIGHTNING SPELLBLADE filter which uses the HC LIGHTNING SPELLBLADE default, but each of the rules say “use default affix group”. When you decide to run a cold one next time, you copy the MY LIGHTNING SPELLBLADE filter, and all you’d need to do is alter the default to the HC COLD SPELLBLADE affix group, cascading all of the rules down into MY COLD SPELLBLADE filter’s ruleset without having to interact with how ever many rules the filter has that use the default.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk