Guide to Evolving a dire pet. : GW Submissions

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

Call of Protection
Otyugh's Cry
Symbiotic Bond
Damage Dealing

Brutal Strike
Call of Haste
Enraged Lunge (Elite)
Feral Lunge
Ferocious Strike (Elite)
Poisonous Bite
Predator's Pounce
Scavenger Strike
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.
Death-leveling a pet
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. 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 lvl15 in about an hour or two.

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 two heroes in Avoid Combat mode with Resurrect and self heals 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 5-6 seconds. Feel free to step away from your computer for 10-15 minutes (or about 30 minutes for lvl20), 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 reenable 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.
Here's a better way around this flaw: Use either Escape, Lightning Reflexes, or Whirling Defense. These skills activate immediately and the pet will (usually) be unable to hit you while you charm it.
Or bring two hero monks, with Resurrect, disable all healing skills and set them to 'Avoid' for the duration of the death leveling. Then when the pet is Lv15 enable the healing and they will keep you alive long enough to re-equip and charm the pet.
Notes
The pet will achieve the aggressive evolution at level 11, and the dire evolution at level 15.
Once your pet has evolved the second time to dire it doesn't matter how you continue to level it up, as evolutions cannot be reversed.
The tamed pet evolution in your party window will not be updated immediately upon its leveling. You can wait until the next departure from an outpost, or force the update by typing '/petname' or '/namepet'.
The untamed pet will not display the evolution throughout its progress to level 15, until tamed and added to the party.
Heroes can charm their own animals. If a hero charms an animal that has not evolved yet, it will most likely turn into a hearty pet because the player is unable to clearly control the evolution. As such, the above described death-leveling method is best for hero-tamed pets.

Can premium members say yay or nay to this being moved to a confirmed section.

Nay these are common methods and most than half people know this already plus alot of this information is posted on guildwiki

Nay

direct copy off of Guild Wiki:
http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Guide_to_e ... a_Dire_Pet

I knew I read that guide somewhere else before...

/nay

need to do some work for real to get premium here.

NAY

locked