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 by allowing the animal to kill you repeatedly, giving it experience. The fastest and most convenient way of getting a dire pet is to bring a heroe with Rebirth and flag him near the pet. Equip superior armor on all your armor pieces and let your death penalty accumulate. At certan death penalty rebirth will not be able to resurrect you and you die immediately after the attempted rebirth. The pet gets the experience after your death and keeps attacking the hero. Give selfheals to the hero so the pet will not be able to kill him. The hero will rebirth you as soon as he has enough energy to cast it so the pet is getting experience every ~10-12 second (some e-management can accelerate the process).

Feel free to step away from your computer for about half an hour, no intermediate actions are required for the animal to continue leveling up. Once the animal has reached level 15, have the hero use Resurrection Chant instead of rebirth, reequip your normal armor and items, and use Charm Animal. Once the animal has reached level 15 reequip your armor and items, and use Charm Animal.

If you do not have Nightfall, un-equip all of your armor and held items and start charming the animal to make it aggressive, then cancel the charm. Draw the animal to a resurrection shrine so that it will start to kill you again as soon as you resurrect.

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