Overview

Wraeblast provides an experimental, feature-rich item filter development framework and toolkit for Path of Exile.

Note

While an example trade league filter is included with the project, ongoing development is focused on the library, not the filter. No guarantees are made about filter quality, feature completeness, accuracy, or updates. Use at your own risk.

Architecture

Filter Template

The filter template is a Jinja2 templated YAML file (.yaml.j2), which provides a more structured approach to developing item filters. While the templating environment provides core features like colormaps, economy insights, and text-to-speech synthesis helpers, it is entirely possible to build simple item filters without any templating whatsoever, while still being able to leverage all of the organizational features Wraeblast provides.

The intermediate template YAML rendered by Jinja2 can be saved to a file for debugging purposes by passing the -i flag to the render_filter CLI subcommand.

Filter Options

The filter options file is an optional, JSON formatted file that configures thresholds, colormaps, and other related pre-render options. These options are available in the template environment via the options object, and are deserialized to a ItemFilterPrerenderOptions object.

For example, to override the maps colormap and generate rules:

example.config.json

{
    "colormaps": {
        "maps": {
            "name": "Hawaii_20_r"
        }
    }
}

example.yaml.j2

{%- for item in ctx.invitations.lines: -%}
{%- set bg = options.colormaps.maps.pick(item.chaos_value) %}
- name: "Invitations - {{ item.name }}"
  conditions:
    BaseType: "{{ item.name }}"
  actions:
    SetBackgroundColor: '{{ bg.hex }}'
    SetBorderColor: '{{ text_color(bg) }}'
    SetTextColor: '{{ text_color(bg) }}'
  tags:
    - maps
    - invitations
{%- endfor %}

Economy Insights

The insights module provides a simple API for slicing and dicing economy data from poe.ninja. Economy data for the given league is fetched asynchronously at the start of each command line invocation, and cached locally for a short period of time. Extended item filter templates can access the ItemFilterContext object via ctx.

Similar Tools

It should be mentioned that other item filter tools and libraries exist, which serve similar but not identical purposes to Wraeblast.

• NeverSink filters are known for being extensible via the FilterBlade web UI, but the underlying framework for structuring the base filters is a custom DSL.
• FilterBlast is another popular in-browser filter configuration tool, which adds a comment layer syntax on top of standard item filters, allowing for parametrization of various filter elements.
• Filtration is a graphical desktop application for creating and customizing filters. It appears to be unmaintained for a few years.

There are probably other tools that haven't been mentioned here. These are all excellent projects, however the use cases and goals for Wraeblast differ quite a bit.

Goals

Strictness

Filter strictness is an extremely common concept that most Path of Exile players are familiar with. Starting a new league? Download the "regular" strictness, of course. Two weeks into the league? Time to switch to "semi-strict", or "turbo-Ω-omni-strict" if you're a real juicer. This probably works well enough for most players, but strictness is subjective depending on an individual player's goals and experience.

One of the major goals for Wraeblast is to make filter "strictness" completely granular, quantifiable, and configurable by the discerning player.

Visual Clarity

While this is more of an underlying problem of the loot system that Path of Exile 2 will hopefully resolve, loot filters play a big part in the time saved or wasted by a player progressing through the end game. Currently, most community maintained filters provide a decent amount of colorful options, and are good at distinguishing between a couple tiers of items: items that might be valuable, and items that are definitely garbage.

Wraeblast attempts to improve visual clarity by:

• Making wholesale filter color changes extremely easy to configure with colormaps, which has the added benefit of making color variations more frequent, vibrant, and meaningful.
• Leveraging data science tools to interpret and transform economy data within the filter template itself.

Graphical Filter Editing

No.

Filter Depth

Popular community filters include rules for every vendor recipe, base types for crafting that may or may not be applicable or even profitable in a given league, and rare but possibly valuable item drops, like double corrupted items, items with Incursion modifiers, and so on. While useful in some situations, it is unlikely that the average player can keep track of every rule and visual cue.

Conversely, while some community filters are cognizant of trade league economy data, customization and configurability is arguably lackluster aside from re-organizing items within pre-defined tiers, and requires a significant time investment, sometimes more than once per league.

Wraeblast solves this problem not by building the ultimate kitchen sink filter, but rather by focusing on the data. Economy data is at the forefront of the filter template environment, and the tools to generate visually appealing, laser focused item filters are provided to aspiring filter authors and players. (The example trade league filters included in this project are pretty cool, too.)