QOL Recommendation: Streamlined Looting & Inventory Management

Dear GGG @ POE Community,

Below is a couple of QOL features I would like to see added to POE2, and, if well received, applied to POE1 as well. I won't give a long winded backstory on my experience with the game as I believe it will be conveyed well enough through what's lined out.. here goes:




Streamlined Looting
Looting is a massive time sink. Let's automate a lot of it without compromising player choice by implementing player customizable tools. You want us to get a lot of gold (as evidenced by the Ventor's Strongbox). You want us to salvage rares for reliable regal shard generation. You want us to salvage socketables and superior items to improve and socket our gear. Well, give us a tool to do that beyond the manual selling of items to vendors and pickups. Most everyone uses a loot filter due to the even greater time sink looting would otherwise be if we were to leverage everything we come across. Yes, of course, use the currency exchange.. great.. what about those who love SSF?

Here's my proposal to do this:


Beef Up the Pet System
Pets are just a cosmetic at the moment with my current understanding. Give them a utility purpose. Let us program them to pick up and automatically identify the items (give the pet a max stack of 1000 scrolls of wisdom) salvage socketables, superiors, rares, and magic items. Allow the player to set up the pet's parameters for which items to do this to (ie: item level, rarity, modifier tier, damage, modifier type, etc.). Essentially, allow the pet to filter through ALL loot with much the same filters as that of the trade site, even that which is hidden by the player's integrated loot filter. This one change will allow players to continously generate currency as they progress through the campaign and maps without the burden of continuously porting back to our hideouts. Let's face it, porting in and out over and over because of a low capacity inventory sucks. Now that you allow us to have infinite portals in maps to essentially eliminate the burden of carefully choosing which and how many items to bring back, it makes sense to shift a system like this.

Allowing the pets to auto collect gold on the floor would also be helpful and appreciated.

Eliminating the mundane should be a priority. The pet should be a beneficial utility sidekick that saves us time, effort, and frustration.



2: Streamlined and integrated Hideout Object/NPC interactions

-Why should we have to speak to a bunch of different NPCs, the Salvage Bench, the Reforge Bench, the stash, the recombinator, and so on in order to evaluate and process through a whole bunch of items? It's exceptionally tedious. Why not just make most, if not all, of these functions accessible from the stash?

Think about how fluid it would feel to click an icon on the side of the stash UI and immediately salvage whatever else you click on in the stash tabs.
What about a shortcut to add it to the reforge bench (why isn't there a reforge queue system?) with a secondary shortcut button to reforge from the same window. I mean, everything we reforge is crap we don't want anyway. Streamline that and force it to only reforge items with the same item level+base type, and if we were to desire to do this with items of differing item levels/base then we would be forced into using the reforge bench directly. This would allow us to sift through our items significantly faster and get back to playing.

The same could be done with the recombinator, but seems it wouldn't be exactly a great improvement.

Look, we shouldn't have to sort through all the items, determine what's going where, remove it from one tab, close the window, walk to an npc or object, open a different window, click the icon, use the process on whatever ones we choose, close that window, go back to the stash, find where we ended, sift through more of it, take more out, close the window, go to another item, do that process, close the window, go back to the stash, shift items from the stash to our inventory then to another tab, and so on and so forth. Sure, some of this is unavoidable, but the vast majority of this wasted effort and mundane clickery is just silly.

I find myself doing 5-15 maps, going through a quad + 3-5 normal dump tabs, searching for "superior", transmuting, augmenting, checking, keep the decent ones for potential gambling (crafting) or recombinating, close the window, salvage, do it over and over till all the superiors are done, then do the same to socketables, then to rares (but maybe some exalts and such on those). Then when done with all that am left with magics and normals. Depending on the item level I'll go for transmutes and augments, ya know, the crafting of stuff n things, and inevitably sell almost all of it anyway to help with gold generation. It's tiresome and feels like a waste of my time after work and the responsibilities of my household being a father of 3 children under 10.

Does all this take a long time? Guess that depends on how fast you've gotten at scrubbing through all the items. The answer is both yes and no. It's variable, it depends on RNG as well. It depends on a lot of factors solely in the hands of the players'. To that end, we have choice, and one could argue we're choosing to waste our time on it, but it really shouldn't feel that way from the beginning. The design is simply clunky and needs to be updated.

Anyway, this feature combined with the pet as mentioned above would make inventory management significantly more user friendly, and would respect our time. However, the next one will dramatically improve this process even further.. and.. it's simple.

Add Player Programmable Search Buttons & Improved Inventory UI
Similar to that of the search system (which is fine for the most part), why not add a set of 3-5 buttons that can be activated by the player across all stash tabs, vendor windows, etc. The same buttons would be attached to each relevant window and could be activated/deactivated at any time. These buttons would allow the player to choose which stats, item level, etc. to be highlighted without having to type it out, or other shenanigans, in the search bar every single time.

Just think.. if i wanted to see any items with T10+ modifiers then i'd be able to set that up, go do a bunch of maps, have a crapload of unsorted items, click that button, send all those to my "to be recombinated" or other "potential crafts" tabs, know for a fact the rest of the items aren't at that value level, click a different button to show all salvageable items and (if adding the other feature mentioned above) click the shortcut icon for salvage, click all the highlighted items after a quick review, done, then move on to another button that shows all items below level 80 and immediately salvage, disenchant, or sell whatever is left.

Obviously, this is just an example, but the idea is solid, and, since this feature would (and should) be completely player customizable, allows extensive flexibility to any given player's preferences or processes. This would further accelerate our ability to determine how to spend our time versus feeling forced to spend our time with a clunky system.

ALSO: I don't enjoy holding ALT down on every item individually since holding alt doesn't carry over between items to show the next one. Item level should be displayed by default (please for the love of all that is good and decent in this world).


Summary: Incorporating these QOL features would drastically improve the player experience, eliminate many mundane elements of the grind pertaining to looting and inventory management, save us time, generate more currency passively (though still actively since we'd be slaying things anyway), and allow us to spend our time on what we want to spend it on without missing out on the opportunities of all the items we choose not to pick up because they're not worth our time in the first place (but suddenly those items become worthwhile when these tasks are automated because we only have to put in a minimal setup effort for a massive over-time gain).

Oh! There's one more grand benefit: the increased generation of shards & gold will allow you to rid us of the +gold modifier in maps and replace it with something that is much more interesting. Though, this does beg the question... if all the players are generating so much gold passively (mostly) then why should we have gold at all? I'm not going to answer this one, but it is something to think about I suppose.



Please keep comments constructive and respectful. Thanks.


*whistles* Just keep looting, just keep looting

your qol suggestion are very well thought out .
love the pet , it was mentionned in an other post too .

i don't get it at the end , u wanna remove gold from the game?

about the gold: i mean, not really. I like it's purpose. It's just that the whole idea of basically always having way more than you could ever need essentially would make all of it's uses free (without being free) if that makes sense.

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Liopleurodon216#3586 a écrit :

Dear GGG @ POE Community,


Eliminating the mundane should be a priority.

This is all I want.