with a tricky bugabuse you can force your pet to chaingun melee ur target (about 0,3-0,5s between the swings)

Didn't know about the bug...had to look...if I wanted to spaz out regularly I would make a minstrel.

Whilst matter may be quicker Im still having a whale of a time with my Spirit Cabby - and have just got high enough to start seriously farming pygmy goblins in Lyonesse.

My spec @L43 is currently 41 +4 spirit, 16+4 matter - and I can more or less constantly pull the yellow and orange con goblins, only pausing to recycle the pet every 5 minutes or so. I would usually kill 10-12 mobs before needing to recycle. I pull with nearsight (allowing a huge pull radius for distant respawns) then spirit debuff the mobs as they get close, and unleash the sapphire simulacrum. The spirit debuff increases the pets lifetap damage - and the debuff seems to work fully for this, with damage to the mob going up by roughly 30% using the 30% spirit debuff. Occasionally I use DOTs or the damage shield against oranges, but usually only need a spirit debuff and the occasional heal versus yellows.

I have also seen 50 matter cabbys farming the same area - and they can manage to pull around 15-25 goblins every 4-5 mins (before waiting for respawns).

However I have also found an interesting alternative for farming blue mobs as a Spirit / matter cabby. Send sapphire pet into the middle of a group of blues and turn on the damage shield - and allow its lifetap to do good damage against the blue mobs - as well as healing the pet. The focus shield builds aggro fairly quickly, allowing you to throw in occasional heals and recast focus without getting aggro. Using this method against dunters I was able to fairly easily kill 8-10 blues at a time, or 10-15 green mobs.

So by the time Im L50 and the goblins go blue I should be able to be killing only slightly slower than a matter cabby - as generally matter cabbys are constrained by respawn rate of mobs in each area. Of course if a matter cabby can find a very densely populated area free from other players then matter spec will be faster for farming.

So spirit is certainly a viable option - still quicker to xp than most other classes - and is very good for avoiding unnecessary deaths as you level. Ive even managed to kill the occasional purple mob when I was levelling in uppland and got accidental aggro - which would have been almost unthinkable with a matter or body spec cabby

with the recent patches (full debuff value on mobs, resist debuffs of different types can stack) cabies are even stronger imho, especially spirit cabs...now we only need the emerald dot and amber-self-don and everything's fine

but the dot NOT before it is fixed that pet dots rupt each tick, if so its the most useless pet for a cab

Magicco wrote:but the dot NOT before it is fixed that pet dots rupt each tick, if so its the most useless pet for a cab

i talked to abydos on this issue several times and from what i understood this either comes with rupt or not at all, though it's hard to fix, as there's a spell for this in the official spelldb found here: http://www.etaew.net/daocdb/spell.php?id=1615

however, its values are so weird dmg -25 = 25%...what does a 25% dmg dot do? 25% of what?...couldn't figure out yet...as soon as we've figured out, it may be implemented or something...