Originally Published by Gamesavor! This guide is an attempt to answer all questions about pets and provide the fullest explanations regarding pets, pet use, and pet attributes. While other guides have been written on the subject they have in the past been full of speculation and not been rigorously tested, as well as lacking in completeness. To ensure the data is correct, nearly every element has been tested and notes on the testing techniques and data are available through the footnotes, so that suspect data/conclusions can be identified. Please bear in mind that guides may become out of date and take into account the publication date of the guide – subsequent patches may well change aspects of the guide.

Rather than wait till the end, we’d like to make some acknowledgments to start with: Thanks to Dragon Incarnate for the original Ultimate Pet Guide, the first work of its kind, and to Valerius for his role in maintaining Dragon Incarnate’s work in the more recently updated pet guide. A big thanks to Daegul Mistweaver for his help with damage values on various foes, which helped kick start the true damage testing; I look forward to your treatise on damage. Of course, the support of our guild (Servants of Fortuna!) through testing has been invaluable, with much time donated to our efforts and help with finding appropriate testing areas. The community has provided insights into many of the issues in this guide, and we of course thank the pet loving community for the time and energy put into pet related posting. Hopefully the new information gleaned from all this testing will be useful, and will settle many debates about pet functionality and usefulness.

We’ll start with the basics:
damage and types of damage done by pets:
Increasing Beast Mastery increases the damage done by an Animal Companion, in a similar manner as Marksmanship. In other words, a Beast Mastery of 12 will allow a pet to do full damage to a target with an AL of 60.Each point of Beast Mastery offsets 5 points of AL, and 40 points of AL doubles/halves the damage in each direction.

Pet Damage Types:
Black Bear - slashing
Lizard - piercing
Lynx/Stalker - slashing
Moa Bird - slashing
Snow Wolf/Wolf - slashing Spider - piercingStrider - piercing
Warthog - blunt

Armour Lvl of pets:
Pets gain 3 armour per lvl so at lvl 10 they have a armour of 60.

Pet Evolutions:
Occasionally when a pet levels up, it "evolves", changing its stats slightly.Evolutions do not change the appearance of a pet, although a pet will change size corresponding to its level. When a pet evolves, it will gain a prefix to its name (if you haven't renamed the pet using /petname or /namepet).

Aggressive = +1 Damage, -30 Health (lvl 10-13)
Dire - +2 Damage, -60 Health (lvl 15-18)
Elder - +? Damage, +? Health (lvl 15-18)
Hearty = -2 Damage, +60 Health (lvl 15-18)
Playful = -1 Damage, +30 Health (lvl 10-13)

not alot of people know the affects of elder but alot think that it has no bonuses or downsides so it would just be +0 damage and +0 health.
It is thought that letting the pet take a lot of hits without healing it much makes the pet into a Hearty or Playful evolution, while letting the pet deal a lot of damage in combat gives it an Aggressive or Dire evolution.Once on an evolution "path", you can't go back.
while elder is goten by havin a playfull pet but then makin it deal lots of damage so when it gets to level 15-18 it becomes elder.

Pets gain XP at the same rate as their master, but it is prorated by their level.This is only important when the Pet's level is different from the Master's level a 20th level character killing a 13th level creature will get zero XP, but his 13th level pet will get 100 XP from the kill. Apparently, pets can learn through osmosis. Even more disturbing is the fact that pets gain XP while they are
pets can only be ressed by comfort animal or revive animal.
and finnaly pet skills are cheap and fast to recharge but can take up alot of space on your skill bar.

Hope u enjoyed my guide on Pets and if u have any questions on pets or purely pet builds then my IGN is Zolo Roranoa or Amozan Ranger.dead. So don't worry if your pet dies during a mission and you can't raise him it is still leveling up along with you.