Diablo 4’s newest item reworks haven’t removed the need for a loot filter

The mind-boggling amount of loot available in Diablo 4 Season 5’s Infernal Hordes has players calling for a loot filter in the game once more.

Despite some frustrating bugs trying to dampen things, Diablo 4 Season 5 has been a hit with players. The newly introduced Infernal Hordes have become the preferred endgame grind and it’s not hard to see why.

Farm enough Burning Aether during your run and you can acquire absurd amounts of Gold which has done a lot to fix one of players’ biggest issues with Season 4. Of course, with numerous Spoils of Hell to spend that Burning Aether on, you can pick up an equally insane amount of gear.

In a loot-driven game like Diablo 4, you’d think that wouldn’t be an issue, but the introduction of Greater Affixes in Season 4 makes a lot of gear fundamentally useless for endgame players. When you can force more than 100 drops from a single chest in an Infernal Horde, the need for a loot filter becomes very apparent.

At this point, it's unacceptable that there is no loot filter in this game.
byu/meepinz indiablo4

Reddit user meepinz showed an example of the ridiculous levels of loot you can get by spending a large amount of Burning Aether on gear chests in a T8 Infernal Horde. While Diablo 4 has visual cues and tooltips for Greater Affix drops, the issue comes when a large amount of gear drops and the game can’t keep up.

“If I’d left all of these items in the area where the box is, you would only see a quarter of the tooltips as they just stop loading/displaying,” meepins explained. “This is a huge pain point when you’re only looking for GA (Greater Affix) items, and no longer need salvaging materials because the GA item tooltips simply won’t display due to clutter.”

Item drops of this magnitude are also especially frustrating for console players who don’t have the precision of PC’s point-and-click meaning they are at the mercy of Diablo 4’s rarity prioritization. “If a summoning mat drops in the middle of that, guess I’m picking up every Legendary and yellow until I can get lucky to grab the Malignant Heart,” one player complained.

Players have been requesting a loot filter in Diablo 4 since the game’s launch but the team behind the game explained that implementing one is tougher than it sounds. Game Director Joe Shely broke down the difficulty of even minor changes to the game in an interview with PC Gamer.

“Every perceivably simple decision has some kind of crazy cause and effect, ripple effect across the whole game,” he said. “Sometimes there’s low-hanging fruit and it goes pretty quickly—and sometimes it’s like, wow, that change is actually 120 changes.”

Now that Blizzard has finally completed the itemization overhaul, however, we could be closer to the coveted Diablo 4 loot filter.