Hi!
Cabby templates are really easy to assemble, and you don't have to have super high-utility ROGs in order to max everything you need. That said, there are a lot of paths to getting templated and you've hit on a few of them already.
Does anyone have any good suggestions on where to farm ROGs? Also wondering which spec works best; I was thinking full spirit and support my pet or full matter or a split spec like 44 spirit 30 matter.
Go full matter spec, find some yellow-blue mobs and start pulling the entire camp. This brings in lots of gold (and XP items which you can sell for gold if you choose the right camps). Take the money and buy ROGs from the housing merchant. Orc Coast Guards and Ogre Threshers west of Diogel can be farmed this way, though it does get crowded there sometimes. Headless footmen west of Fort Gwentyl drop equivalent XP items and you won't have to share camps with other cabbies and necros. There are other camps in the old zones, as well as in the FZ where you can farm as well. XP items sell for anywhere from 300g to 1p per stack of 10.
Personally, I like the slower pace of full-Spirit Cab farming. Pick mobs that are yellow-to-light purple and just start pulling with a fully-buffed sappy. Ancient Zombies and Blood Liches in SI are good candidates since they are undead and spirit-weak to your sappy lifetap. If you want, you can also do water elementals and ghosts if you want the XP item drops, too. With these mobs, you will want to collect your own ROGs. Anything 50+ utility makes a fine candidate for your template, and it doesn't take too long to get a good set to choose from.
Has anyone ever tried the third spec? On paper daoc seems like it would be the best as the pets stats are still fully buffed and then I get a decent focus shield and can support the pet with dots.
I've never tried farming with a split-spec, though I'm personally not very happy with focus-assisted pulling since the focus-shield nerf many months ago. Against a single target, your pet should be able to hold aggro pretty well, but I imagine that if you multi-pull and aren't kiting, that your pet will have a hard time keeping aggro with the focus shield in its current form.
I am assuming I want to farm higher level mobs for better ROGs.
Another option is to farm lower quality ROGs from lower-level mobs and then salvage them (using jewelcrafting) and combine the remnants to create higher-level ROGs. Ofc, this approach will require you to burn feathers for what is essentially a gamble, but you should be able to mass-kill blues and thereby get a lot of salvageable ROGs to work with. Another plus of this approach is that the amount of gold you get from a red or purple kill is not significantly more than the gold you get from a blue or yellow kill, so you are usually gold ahead for killing 3 blues in the same time as it would take to kill a single red or purple, as well as having a shot at dropping 3 level 50 ROGs instead of a single level 51 ROG. Matter cabs, ofc, take this calculus to the extreme.
Anyway, good luck and happy farming!
:hugs: