Faster Pet Levelling (Dire)

Hi, I just became interested in pets a couple of days ago and scoured the 'net reading about them. There are a lot of exhaustive pet guides out there so kudos to those who produced 'em

In my experimentation, however, I thought up a nice, simple little technique of levelling a pet to Dire from lvl5-20 faster than any of the guides and suggestions I could find. The shared online knowledge all points to Dire evolution requiring a high damage output from the pet and, of course, to do this your pet must stay alive. This is the tricky part of pet evolution. If you want a Hearty then just go farming and take the pet with you; if it dies it doesnt matter.

So, for levelling we want the highest level monsters we can solo. And for Dire we want our pet alive and kicking throughout.

So this is what I did:

Location: Elona Reach (lvl20 Minotaurs and lvl22 Dune Burrowers)
Equipment: Doesn't really matter. I tool a Vokur's staff though (+15 energy +7 armour against physical)
Attributes: High Beastmastery, High Expertise, Med-High WS (I cant remember my points distribution and being exact doesnt really matter).

Skill sets:

1. Charm animal (of course)
2. Escape (elite)
3. Throw Dirt (or Lightning Reflexes)
4. Whirling Defense
5. Brutal Strike
6. Feral Lunge
7. Poisonous Bite
8. Trolls Unguent.

Now go to Elona and do that little farm all those mo/Ws seem to love so much (the first pack of minotaurs).

a) Take the Vision Crystal and KEEP IT. As long as you hold it then 95% of the time your foe will ONLY attack YOU. (you can drop it after the inital aggro damages if u like)
b) Aggro 1-4 minotaurs (any more is a little unsafe)
c) Activate Escape, then one of your 2ndary stances, then Escape and so on.
d) Keep Troll Unguent going regularly (tho 100% Trolls is not required)
e) Attack with Feral Lunge and then Poisonous Bite (gives them -7 degen)
f) Use Brutal Strike when below 50%, or when you have plenty of energy. Otherwise just use Feral Lunge to keep adding damage.
g) Watch them die. That's it. It's a relatively fast kill, totatlly safe and heaps of XP.

As you get more confident you can start killing the Dune Burrowers (lvl22) too. These are a bit nastier because of Precision Shot (cant evade it) so you'll need to keep Troll's Unguent going more consistently. Attacking these is where I would really recommend taking Throw Dirt instead.

And that's it. You should have a Dire lvl 20 in no time. The secret, of course, is in aggroing with the Vision Crystal so don't forget it!

the item holding trick was fixed when factions came out.

Also, the fastest way to get a dire pet is to have it kill you repeatedly before you capture it, eventually it will become lvl 15 and since you didn't damage it and it kept damaging you, it will become dire. At that point you capure the pet.

Just find an animal, start charm animal, cancel it, and have the pet chase you to a rez shrine. Have it kill you, and you will rez again, etc... Go afk for a while and you're good.

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I used this method with a couple of changes to the skill set and it worked great. I raised my pet from level 8 to level 19 Dire in about 3 hours.

^Rather than use Escape as your elite, why not try Oath Shot with whirling defense and throw dirt. That'd let you have a constant evasion stance and constant blind.

Escape is cr*p. I used elona to farm my pet dire ages ago. Took heal as one. Much more useful elite for this job tbh

I've tried Oath Shotting but the Elona Mino's may block those. Frankly, I've been there and I am a little sceptical about that build and using Elona to train a young pet, let alone doing it with 4 Mino's at a time. Then again, I had neither Heal As One nor Poisonous Bite at that time.
Anyway, I wouldn't really recommend Elona until your pet is at least lvl 12, the Ice Tooth Cave mino's work fast enough, possbily faster as they die much faster, until then.

Duplicate post. sorry

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