Zaishen Menagerie

My wife has almost 10,000 Balthazar Faction points from doing the recent Halloween costume brawls. She/we do not PvP. It was more blind luck of getting on a good team and not hurting the team to badly, so the team won.

Unlocking skills and items for PvP has low value. My wife loves pets, but hates to charm and level them. Using the Balthazar Faction points at the Mendgerie might be practical.

The Zaishen Menagerie has unlocking costs for pet tiers and animal unlocks.

Is unlocking a pet tier, animal type specific?
Does unlocking a pet tier, unlock it for all animal types?

Thanks.

You first unlock the pet, and then can spend further faction to unlock higher levels of evolution for it. Although, if you and your wife don't PvP and still only have a max cap of 10k, you probably won't be able to pay for those higher tiers with your Balthazar faction.

you can unlock them with zaishen coins aswell.
you can level them too by deathleveling them before charming them.

This is by far the most effective thing you could do. With all the proper items/equiptment/skills you can death level a pet to level 20 hearty (which unlocks every tier for that pet) in as little as 20 minutes.

Zaishen Menagerie

You unlock each lvl tier per animal type. You cannot unlock lvl 20 dire for all animals in ur menagerie in one go for example.

Spend the 10k to unlock 10 pets for 1k balt faction each if you don't feel like charming them. I suggest saving your z coins.

Once you've unlocked the pet, equip one armor set with all superior runes to get your hp as low as possible and have a vampiric weapon ready. Your elite should be Blood is Power. Bring a mesmer hero with a fast cast res to the Menagerie. Enter the Menagerie with your hero and find the pet you want to death level. Stay in its aggro range.

Spam BiP until you reach 1 hp, the vampiric weapon should kill you instantly every time you get res'd by your hero. Everytime you die, the pet gains exp and levels.

Take a 30 mins break. Once the pet you want to charm is level 20, switch to a non-vampiric weapon as soon as you get res'd again. Switch to your regular armor set and charm the animal. Give the level 20 animal to the trainer, and you can unlock all the levels and tiers for that specific pet.

Note: How fast the pet levels depends on how close you are to it when death leveling.

Sorry disagree. I leveled all my pets in one go (they were Hearty rather than dire though. Nonetheless that is sufficient enough to unlock all tiers for that specific pet).

Disagree again. When you're about to death level a pet it would be wiser to kill all of the same type pets around it and leave but one alive. Doing this will cause the one left to recieve full experience and thus level much faster to 20.

I forgot to mention leaving only 1 of them alive, but I've had different times when death leveling pets. The ones that tend to wander farther away from you take longer to level than the ones that don't. This is just based on my observation.

This is because they have to be in your aggro bubble in order to recieve the experience from your death.

Well you can't control if the pet goes out of your aggro bubble when you're death leveling and afk :P You can, however, try to estimate the best location to death level the pet. Do you know how large the aggro bubble is?