Curse

wsmcasey · Nov 21, 2007, 02:45 PM // 14:45

Last night I decided to cap a canthan phoenix. I got it to lvl 11 and it's evolved into "playful" because I set it to be passive while I did all the fighting. If I set it to be aggressive or defensive how do you think it evolve from this point. Will it turn Elder, Hearty or Dire?

odly · Nov 24, 2007, 10:01 AM // 10:01

Most pets turn hearty if you use them during normal play.

It won't go in the direction of dire unless you use a specific build to make them do all the damage and add lots of protection so they don't take much damage.

PureEvilYak · Nov 24, 2007, 12:30 PM // 12:30

If its playful, it can't go dire from here. If you set it to aggressive (while letting it take little damage) it will go elder. If you continue as is, it shall be hearty.

Chthon · Nov 24, 2007, 07:46 PM // 19:46

The AI setting has NOTHING to do with the evolution of your pet.

We've got it narrowed down to two variables:
1. The ratio of the amount damage the pet does to the amount of damage you do.
2. The ratio of the amount of damage the pet does to the amount of damage the pet takes.
We're not quite sure if it's one or the other or both that actually matters, but we do know that maximizing or minimizing both together WORKS.

By forbidding it from attacking, you guaranteed it would deal 0 damage, so you did more damage than it did, and (assuming it got hit even once) it took more damage than it dealt. Hence the playful evolution.
Mostly likely, you're going to end up with a hearty pet at this point. It's widely accepted that a pet cannot go from playful to dire (or aggressive to hearty). You might be able to get to elder, if you went with a full-on beastmaster build, grabbed a bonder hero, and leveled it on melee-only monsters. You'd basically try to follow lennymon's method (described in this thread) in reverse. Getting to elder is pretty hard though, especially since getting the xp for the higher levels is harder and more tedious. One final option would be to keep it at playful forever. You could do that by farming the xp in a worm, which would keep the pet from ever evolving.