Best Way to Evolve your Pet to Hearty?

I've extensively read Jenosavel's guide to pets and done a comprehensive search on the boards. There appears to be many guides to evolving a Dire pet, but no real guidance other than "it's easy" for a Hearty pet.

Here's my "theory" as to the best way to do evolve a Hearty pet - I'd love to hear suggestions as to (1) whether this would work and (2) if there is an easier way to do it.

Per Jenosavel's guide, the keys to developing a Hearty pet is (1) to maximize the amount of damage the pet takes and (2) to minimize the amount of damage the pet deals.

In short, that means you need to set your Beast Mastery skill to zero, and need to make sure that the pet dies a very slow (and agonizing) death, to ensure that he takes as much damage as possible.

Given that:

Step 1: Find a place where level 20+ monsters wander around solo, or in very small groups, and use damage-only skills (i.e. no health degeneration).

Step 2: Set your Beast Mastery to zero. Bring defensive stances to ensure you take very little damage.

Step 3: Send in the pet, and don't attack. Heal the pet as much as humanly possible, to maximize the damage it takes before it dies.

Step 4: After the pet dies, begin your attack and get the monster down to almost zero health, and then rez the pet.

Step 5: Kill the monster in one last shot. This maximizes the XP your pet will get, and ensures that the pet doesn't do any further damage to it.

Step 6: Find your next monster and lather, rinse and repeat.

This method ensures that (1) your pet takes much, much more damage than you; (2) you are doing much, much more damage than the pet and (3) the pet continues to level up quickly through the experience gain.

For you beastmasters out there, is this a reasonable method? Do you have any other tips I might be missing?

If you want a lvl 20 hearty pet, just run around with 0 BM and let your pet die a lot. That's all you have to do. If you have barrage, you can join BP groups also, which will help. You really have to try to make your pet evolve to anything other than hearty, so there's not much point in making a 'guide' to doing so.

^ I've found that as long as you are the primary damage dealer, and your pet dies a few times, you're assured a Hearty Pet.

Even if it doesn't die and deals a major part of the damage, a playfull/hearty evolution will likely be the result.

Low points in BM and just let pet gain experience while dead.

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I think the disconnect is that many folks think dieing makes a pet follow the hearty evolution, where it's actually damage taken (along with other factors of course). Obviously if your pet is dead, it cannot take damage and it's damage dealt vs your damage dealt scale seems to bug out if the pet is dead mostly. Here's my opinion though, if you aren't using your pet enough that it's alive most of the time, likely your playstyle isn't going to be affected by having any evolution and in fact a non-evolved (aka standard) pet may be the best thing for you anyway. Bottom line, play with your pet in training exactly how you WANT to end up playing with your pet and you stand the best chance of getting a favorable evolution, aka big hearty tank evolves from tanking not being dead.
I've not tested this enough to find out where the lines are, but basically I don't recommend fighting mostly things which 10 levels over the level of your pet unless you are wanting unevolved as there seems to be at least a 50/50 shot of it when I do that, regardless of the fact that my pet deals ALL the damage and takes none.

I finally got it right with my hyena going for the Dire route. Basically call targets for your pet and let him kill everything with pattacks while you keep yourself alive with the enemies focused on killing you. Hearty pets just seemed to always happen to me when trying to make a dire.

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I've never needed to TRY to get a Hearty pet, that's what I always end up with unless I specifically try not to...

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