Is "Scavenge another player's farm" a legit farming strategy 🤔?

Hi

On last weekend I end up on a game, where I discovered that another players had already farmed Cows and Chaos (I saw the Cow's portal in town, and at first I was plannig to farm Chaos by myself...). Before exiting the game, I decided to explore both areas, and found some loot (Gems, low Runes, magic charms/rings/amulets and, what surprised me, a

Burning Essence of Terror and an

Andariel's Visage!!!).

This make me thing if are there people that just join games looking for leftover from another players... and if is it worth...
(logically if you are searching for budget things - as I think the Essence and the good Unique was an one time thing only...)

First thing that comes to my minds Is that is not always easy/simple to discover where others players have already farmed (the game do shows you that...) and if they farmed in a enough high level...

The effectiveness of that depends on who you're following. Additionally, the "acceptability" of it depends on how closely you follow them.

A lot of folks will - for example - do CS speed-clears with seal pops, take out diablo and then do a quick tele-pass back to the entrance to grab the seal-pop loot. If you follow within the same zone and take their seal-pop loot while they're still sitting next to diablo, that's kind of a dick move and won't make for a happy farmer ahead of you.

If however you let that same person finish up CS and once they moved on to

Baal or whatever else they may be doing, you then go to CS and check what they left there, I would say that's perfectly fine and most people would probably be quite happy with "reliable scavangers" like that as it would make for easy player-count-increasing in their farming games.

By definition though, all you will get is the leftovers. A lot of folks at this stage are really only in it for the high-end drops (or even only the XP) and will leave a lot of stuff on the Ground that others may still find valuable, potentially making it a worthwhile strategy for you. But even then, you are effectively hard-capping the max value of your finds.

Andariel's Visage for example won't matter to a lot of folks so long as it isn't

Eth so you getting a non-

Eth one from leftovers isn't exactly surprising. But the odds of getting an

Eth one out of it would be quite slim. Unless the rolls suck in which case that, too would hit the Ground again.

At the same time, you also still have a lot of farmers who just keep nearly everything, even in the lower value range. With them, scavenging afterwards would obviously be a complete waste of time. So if you do go that route, make sure you figure out which category your farmer belongs to first.

Personally, if you do wanna go that route, I'd suggest combining it. Do it as a barb, find a farmer that only cares about top-end (or just XP, ideally) and that runs a build that actually leaves corpses. That way, you can scavenge whatever is left plus you can hork his entire clear on top of that for more loot. Just make sure you follow up quick enough to where the corpses haven't despawned yet (while still staying far enough back to not interfere).

Either way though, if you can clear your own farming games decently well, you're bound to remain better off doing that. No limit to the drops there. Plus you actually get some XP out of it as well.

Just to be clear
I was not thinking in stalking players and steal things before they can catch it... (it would make me a douchebag ...)
I was thinking more on the way to catch what they left behind after they abandon the farm...

But I got your point

Just a note, I never dropped

Andariel's Visage myself... that's why it surprises me

fredkid wrote: 6 months ago

This make me thing if are there people that just join games looking for leftover from another players... and if is it worth...
(logically if you are searching for budget things - as I think the Essence and the good Unique was an one time thing only...)

I sometimes do it - on HC, with a level 1 (or slightly higher) character. If this is my first character (so I have literally nothing, not even gold in the shared stash), I join cow games (if possible, finished ones - so I do not "steal" the place of a character eligible for exp) and look for low items usable at the very beginning of the game - most often metal armors or other valuable items to sell them for gold and then buy the best available gear from NPCs. Maybe FCR rings or other low level crap. And there is a (very) slim chance that a normal/4 sox

Crystal Sword got unnoticed... Since the character is at very low level, even if the red TP is hot, I won't lose anything.
At a higher level or when I already have another character capable of farming, scavenging is not worth it.

Personally i believe Andariels was left by accident as in.. the player did not see it, maybe a Mosaic assa in a hurry to keep charges up.

i have seen 1 or 2 items left that 'no one' would leave in

Chaos Sanctuary on purpose.

they simply just didnt see it before they left.

But the essence was probably left on purpose, some just have too many of them, i know i have on non ladder, and soon ladder too.