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 the 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.

Pet Death Leveling
The basis of this concept is to level the animal before successfully charming it as your pet. To do this, un-equip all of your armor and held items and 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 draw the animal to a resurrection shrine so that it will start to kill you again as soon as you resurrect. Alternatively, you can bring heroes to use Resurrect on you as soon as you die, speeding up the process. However if using heroes- be certain to set them to passive so they don't kill the animal, don't give them any skills that they could use to heal you (but give them self heals like Healing Signet), and flag them a bit away so that the animal won't attack them instead of you.

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