Guide to evolving a dire pet

A Dire Pet is the ideal offensive companion. It will deal the most damage of all pet evolutions, but at the expense of having less Health Points.

There are two different ways to obtain a dire pet:
 * 1) Tame an un-evolved pet and have it kill monsters in order to gain experience and consequently evolutions
 * 2) Allow a wild pet to gain experience and evolutions by repeatedly killing your character in a method known as 'Death Leveling' before taming it at a dire evolution.

Standard Pet Leveling
To evolve a pet to dire, the pet must do a fair share of damage-dealing, but it must not get used to taking damage. So the main idea is that you take all the damage while the pet kills foes. For this you should equip a combination of skills that serve all three of your purposes. Keeping yourself alive can be done with skills from wilderness survival or your primary profession, but below are some skills that are recommended to keep your pet alive and help it deal damage. Attributes don't make much difference as long as your Beast Mastery attribute is as high as possible.

Suggested Skills Pet Protection Damage Dealing
 * (Elite)
 * (Elite)
 * (Elite)
 * (Elite)
 * (Elite)

Now that you have a skill bar setup, you can choose a place to farm the experience for your pet. Find a place with level 10-15 monsters that primarily deal direct damage, and try to stay away from mobs with mesmers, necromancers, and/or monks. Mesmer and necromancer hexes can make your pet's job more difficult, and monks will likely be able to out-heal your pet. Below are some suggested areas and groups of mobs.

Suggested Areas
 * The Minotaurs outside the Ice Tooth Cave.
 * The Mergoyle Wavebreakers outside the Gates of Kryta.
 * The Minotaurs at the beginning of the Elona Reach mission.
 * The Trolls outside Droknar's Forge.
 * The Mountain Yetis outside Seitung Harbor.
 * The Insects outside Yohlon Haven.

Killing Without Damage
Life stealing and health degeneration are not considered damage and will not affect your pet's evolution. It is possible to quickly level a pet to dire by using conditions to degen enemies to death, or by creating a touch ranger to quickly kill enemies with life stealing.

Pet Death Leveling
The basis of this concept is to level the animal before successfully charming it as your pet. To do this start charming the animal to make it aggressive, then cancel the charm. Allow the animal to kill you repeatedly, giving it experience.

To make the process faster, it is recommended that you un-equip all of your armor and held items and draw the animal to a resurrection shrine so that it will start to kill you again as soon as you resurrect. However, not all animals will follow you that far. Alternatively, you can bring heroes to use Resurrect on you as soon as you die, speeding up the process. But if using heroes, be certain to set them to passive so they don't kill the animal and don't give them any skills that they could use to heal you (but give them self heals like Healing Signet). If you don't mind staying at your computer to make repetitive actions, it can be faster to use sacrifice skills or frenzy to help the pet kill you.

It's easy to death level if you go out to an area and kill off all the surrounding enemies. Flag any henchmen & heroes you aren't using far far away from you. Then flag a healer hero next to you and disable all healing spells. Unequip all armor and weapons and get the animal to attack you. If you equip your healer hero with Rebirth and keep his/her protection prayers low, you will resurrect with a low health level, making it easy for the animal to kill you. Then all you have to do is hit "space" to get it to attack you and then stand there and die. It will also resurrect you close to the healer to keep the damage to them minimal since the animal will start chasing them when you die. (You may have to start putting on armor as the animal levels up to give your healer time to regenerate or heal while the animal kills you.) As soon as you resurrect, start hitting the space bar to get the animal to attack you instead (be sure to unequip any weapons!)  This is a fairly speedy & easy process, albeit repetitive.

However, the fastest method is to use death penalty and resurrection skill mechanics to your advantage. Start by affixing three or more superior (not vigor or absorption) armor runes to reduce your maximum health, then flag a passive hero with Resurrect and self only heals like Healing Signet near your future pet. Allow the pet to begin killing you, so that you start accumulating death penalty and the pet starts accumulating experience. At a certain level of death penalty you will die immediately after every attempted resurrection, but the pet will continue to get the experience after each of your deaths as if it had killed you. In this way, the pet will gain experience as if it were killing you every 8 seconds.

Feel free to step away from your computer for about an hour or two, no intermediate actions are required for the animal to continue leveling up.

Once the animal has reached level 15 reequip your armor and items, and use Charm Animal.

Related Articles

 * Animal Companions
 * Pet Evolution Statistics (sub-section)
 * Pet attack skills quick reference

Related Builds
Standard Pet Leveling
 * Build:R/any_Tank_Master

Pet Death Leveling
 * Build:R/N Suicide Pet's Food