Path of Exile is, in part, a game about comparing items. As we progress our character builds into the endgame and continue specializing our skill setups, stat and gear needs become more specific. Most melee characters won't need to bother with spell damage; DoT builds might skip over critical hit chance. Gradually, more and more items become irrelevant, unless they're providing—or can be made to provide—the narrowing set of modifiers a build relies on. With how much loot PoE throws at you, however, weighing the stats of every individual drop would leave you spending more time assessing items than actually playing the game.
Enter the loot filter. Back in 2015, Grinding Gear Games added built-in functionality to filter what items are displayed and highlighted as they tumble out of the countless thousands of slain goatfolk, helping players quickly identify useful items before they've even picked them up. Making your own loot filter can be an involved process, so a cottage industry of loot filter designers emerged, offering bespoke filters for players to install that highlight and emphasize the gear and currency drops that matter most.
Among the most popular PoE loot filter creators is NeverSink, whose filters for PoE 1 uses "over 500 different rules that highlight and hide items based on usefulness and value," which can be fine-tuned further to meet a player's specific criteria with the FilterBlade platform. While that existing filter isn't compatible with Path of Exile 2, NeverSink's already released an experimental PoE 2 "light filter", providing an initial, basic set of loot-highlighting features that'll gradually expand in functionality. It comes at a good time, because PoE 2 just boosted loot drops across the board.
As it stands, the initial PoE 2 filter doesn't yet do much automatic gear filtering based on item type and modifiers. For the moment its main utility is highlighting crucial drops like currency, jewelry, and character progression items—as well as socketed and superior-quality gear—with sounds, visible light beams, and varying font sizes, to ensure you don't leave an area while there's an orb still lying on the ground. Can you imagine? Leaving an orb? Awful stuff.
"This is a new and experimental filter, it has WAY less polishing and is not even comparable in scope to my POE1 filter," NeverSink says in the lite filter's description on GitHub. "Tread with caution and please provide feedback!"
Importantly, unlike PoE 1 FilterBlade filters, NeverSink's PoE 2 light filter doesn't auto-update. If you want to keep your filters up to date with NeverSink's latest feature editions, it'll be worth checking in regularly on the GitHub project until it's ready for a fully-fledged launch.
"NeverSink/FilterBlade will fully support PoE2! But first, we need data, experience, and time," the FilterBlade website currently reads. "Expect a customizable filter after 2-8 weeks."
