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.
 * The Doppleganger in hard mode Augury Rock.

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. Make sure that you are NOT in Hard Mode as when you reach 60% Death Penalty you will be forced to leave your explorable area (This does not apply to characters in Pre-Searing Ascalon).

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. 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 Avoid Combat 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. The pet will reach level 15 in about an hour or two.

Watch out for too much death penalty as the pet will evolve into an Elder if it was leveled up mainly by instant death after being resurrected. However, once the pet reached level 15, you may wish to use death penalty and resurrection skill mechanics to your advantage to quickly level it up to 20. Switch to an armor with three or more superior (not vigor or absorption) armor runes affixed to reduce your maximum health, then flag two heroes in Avoid Combat mode with Resurrect and self heals near your future pet. Allow the pet to continue killing you after every 5 seconds, so that you start accumulating death penalty and the pet continues to accumulate 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 5-6 seconds. Feel free to step away from your computer for 10-15 minutes, 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.
 * NOTE* this method is flawed - you will be unable to reequip your armor and items in the fraction of a second you are alive. It is suggested that you equip one or more of your heroes with Vengeance (you will need to disable the skill by holding shift and clicking it, then re-enable it when your are ready to use it) so that you are resurrected with full health, as normal resurrection will only give you 25% (thus the instant death.) This will give you enough time to reequip your armor and items, and then charm the animal.


 * Another method of getting around this flaw is to salvage the superior runes from your armor, thus increasing your maximum health. Once this is done, you will not automatically die when resurrected, giving you the chance to charm the animal. However, if using this method, you may want to use cheap armor with superior runes while performing the death leveling, so as not to inadvertently destroy your expensive armor when salvaging out the runes.


 * Or bring two hero monks, with Resurrect or Rebirth along with Resurrection Signet, disable all healing skills and the Resurrection Signet and set them to 'Avoid' for the duration of the death leveling. Then when the pet is level 20 disable Resurrect or Rebirth, enable Resurrection Signet, and enable the healing and they will keep you alive long enough to re-equip and charm the pet. It should also be noted that this method eliminates the need to lure a potential pet near a resurrection shrine.


 * Of course, if you don't want to do either of those, you can simply disable the res on your heroes, allow yourself to spawn at the shrine, and equip your armor there.

NOTE: Death leveling will take only about half an hour if you bring a hero with resurrect and take off your armor (Do not buy sup runes or low level armor, better and cheaper without armor). Do not worry about too much DP, the pet will spend most of the time swinging about 4 times at you to cause death, only killing you from one strike once it gets to L15 (Dire), at which point you put on your full armor and the pet will need many swings to take you down, plenty of time to charm and some spare as you do not carry any sup run with you, works even if you do not have sup vigor and vitae/survivor on your armor set. You don't even need to engage enemies if you go for a pet that wonders right outside a post, away from any enemies. Fastest and surer way to Achieve Dire or Elder (get to aggressive in 15 min and then carry your pet around without any pet attacks, it will follow the evolution back to hearty, so at L15, it becomes Elder or devolve, which has the same stats). You can get a full barrage hero team with 3-4 pets in 2 hours this way. (choosing to death level a pet right outside a post, so you can go in and out to re-charm the pet for another hero, without fighting enemies or trying to clear areas with many pets-to-be). You can of course death level any pet this way, but by going away from posts, you'll need to clear the area of monsters, maybe many times if you want the same pet for your heroes as well. Polar bears and mountain eagles are ideal as they do wander real close to the first post in GW:EN, if you go for the polar bear, you do not need any skills or monks, as the polar bear is right outside and far away from any monsters.

Related Articles

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