I was kicking that idea around too, the only problem is that it'd be highly dependent on other people, and the other DoL's are all very efficient solo. I mean, you could go pretty meta and have your character find an abandoned farming spot that NPCs "used" to kill enemies, and you'd find a pile of slaughtered random local wildlife, though that's a really meta concept that might take people out of the game.
For some reason I thought they planned to remove offhand tools for DoL and DoH. Can't find the link though, maybe I'm just going crazy.As for offhand nodes, I have been playing with the idea of an animal graveyard (pile of mixed bones etc) where you can scavenge for unusual mats.
But yeah being able to go into a cave and find an animal's feeding ground or something would be kinda neat. Going too much further with Ghostbusters stuff like finding Undead shrines for scraps of cloth or undead bits would be a bit much for a Shepherd.