I just saw a video where a Wizard farmed yellows in Act I killing as many Elites as fast as possible. He only picked up the rare items, no blues, no gems etc. Just gold and yellows / uniques.
I usually do something similar, but I pick up blues and other goodies, like gems, as well.
Usually the blues are not that good, but I still check and vendor them.
Here is my question: Is it worth picking up blues on such runs or is counter productive as the time invested could be used to farm even more yellows?
This is all assuming you can survive in higher Acts and you just crush everything in Act I.
Best Answer
Yes, since patch 1.0.3 there is a chance you get ilvl 63 items, so blue items can be worth a lot when you are lucky. I for myself always pickup ALL the blue items which let me make a lot of gold simply by selling all the useless stuff.
I sort them in my inventory as I pick them up so that items with ilvl 61+ start in the lower right corner of my inventory, everything that I sell on AH I put in the lower left corner and all the stuff to sell to the merchant start in the top right corner. When my inventory is full I can rush to city, sell all the stuff that's useless, salvage all the ilvl 61+ items at the blacksmith (they give the highest materials) and put the items to sell on AH in my stash.
Sure you lose a bit of time, but that way I make an extra 100-200k gold each hour which can be very important especially if you didn't find any 10 million gold items yet :)