The Ultimate KingShot Pet Guide (2025): Pro Strategies for Leveling, Refining & Taming Marks

The Ultimate KingShot Pet Guide (2025): Pro Strategies for Leveling, Refining & Taming Marks

1. Introduction: The Importance of Pets in KingShot

Mastering the pet system is essential for maximizing your account's potential in KingShot. This crucial feature becomes available around Day 55 of your server, offering significant combat buffs and unique skills that can turn the tide of battle.

Each pet provides three core advantages:

• Primary Buffs: Boosts Squad Attack and Squad Defense, which increase automatically as the pet levels up.
• Secondary Buffs: Unlocked at Pet Level 10, these provide vital Health and Lethality for your Infantry, Cavalry, and Archer squads. These are improved through the "Refine" process.
• Unique Pet Skills: A special ability unlocked at Pet Level 10 that improves automatically each time the pet is "Advanced," providing a tactical edge.

2. "Upgrade" and "Advance": The Path to a Powerful Pet

This is the fundamental way to increase your pet's base power and unlock its skill potential.

• Upgrading: The process of leveling up your pet using Pet Food.
• Advancing: Every 10 levels, you must "Advance" the pet to continue leveling. This requires Growth Manuals and, at higher levels, Nutrient Potions and Promotion Medallions.

How to get pet resources? These key items are primarily obtained from the Beast Whisperer event, Pet Adventures, the Arena Shop, the Alliance Championship Shop, and by purchasing various packs.

Pet Advancement Requirements & Costs (Note: Costs vary by Pet Rarity: N / R / SR)

For a complete list of all upgrade costs, refer to this detailed community spreadsheet: Pet Upgrade Requirements

3. Unlocking Unique Pet Skills

A pet's unique skill unlocks at Level 10 and automatically levels up every 10 pet levels thereafter (e.g., at level 20 the skill becomes level 2, at level 30 it becomes level 3, and so on).

• Gray Wolf's Construction Aide: Reduces the construction time of any building started within the next 5 minutes by 5-15%.

• Lynx's Comforting Embrace: Instantly grants you 35-60 Stamina upon use.

• Bison's Grip of the Titan: When activated, your next march to a resource tile will gather all resources instantly. The skill will show as "Active" until it has been used.

4. Primary Pet Buffs & Upgrading Strategy

These buffs (Squad Attack & Defense) increase automatically as you level up your pet. A key finding is that higher rarity pets provide a better return on investment (ROI) for primary stats. For example, a Level 25 Bison offers higher stats than a Level 40 Gray Wolf, despite costing significantly fewer resources to reach that point.

• Which Pet to Upgrade First in KingShot?
  1. Prioritize High Rarity: Ignoring skills, you should focus your resources on upgrading your highest-rarity pets first (e.g., Bison, then Lynx), as their primary stat growth is more efficient.
  2. Consider Marginal Gains: Since upgrade costs increase exponentially, switch your focus once leveling your Bison becomes too expensive for a small gain. At that point, leveling your Lynx or another pet will provide a more cost-effective improvement.

5. "Refine" Secondary Buffs: The Secret to Dominance

Unlocked at Level 10, the six secondary buffs are the core of your pet's combat power. They are increased using the "Refine" system with Taming Marks.

5.1 Refining Mechanics Explained

• The Process: Using a Taming Mark randomly rerolls your six secondary stats. Some may increase (green), while others decrease (red).
• Your Choice: You can Replace your current stats with the new ones or Retry. The Taming Mark is consumed regardless of your choice. Only retry if the negative changes heavily outweigh the positive ones.
• Stat Rarity: As a stat increases, its bar fills. Once maxed, it upgrades in rarity: Common (Gray) → Uncommon (Green) → Rare (Blue) → Epic (Purple) → Legendary (Gold). A stat can never drop back to a lower rarity once promoted. Your pet must be Level 20 to upgrade a stat from Common to Uncommon.

5.2 The Critical Finding: Rarity vs. Efficiency (The Experiment)

The video's experiment reveals two competing factors that dictate the best refining strategy:

1. Ease of Upgrade: Lower rarity pets (like the Gray Wolf) have very low stat caps in their initial tiers (e.g., 1.01% for the common tier). This makes it extremely fast and cheap to max out these early tiers.
2. Stat Capacity: Higher rarity pets (like the Moose or Cheetah) have much higher stat caps in their initial tiers (e.g., 3.02% for the uncommon tier). While progress feels slower, the total potential stat gain from the same number of Taming Marks is significantly higher.

Conclusion: After 100 Common Taming Marks, the Gray rarity pet yielded a ~10.6% total stat gain. The same 100 marks on a Green rarity pet yielded a ~18% total stat gain. Therefore, you get significantly more stats by investing in higher-rarity pets, even if progress feels slower.

5.3 The Optimal Refining Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide

The most efficient Taming Mark strategy is to focus on the "easiest gains" first, working your way up through your pets to maximize your ROI.

• Step 1: Start with Lowest Rarity, Common-Tier Pets. Identify your lowest rarity pet that still has stat bars in the common (gray/white) tier and begin refining it.
• Step 2: Upgrade All Stats to Green. Continue refining that pet until all six of its stat bars have been promoted to the uncommon (green) tier. This will happen very quickly due to the low stat cap.
• Step 3: Move to the Next Pet. Once your first pet has no more common-tier stats, move to your next-lowest rarity pet and repeat the process.
• Step 4: Clear All Common Tiers. Your goal is to use this efficient method to upgrade every single common-tier stat bar on all of your pets to green.
• Step 5: Begin on Green Tiers. Only after all pets have their stats in at least the green tier should you go back to your lowest rarity pet and begin the slower process of upgrading its green-tier stats.

Advanced Refining Tips:

• Prioritize Key Stats: In general, Infantry Health and Archer Lethality are considered the most valuable secondary buffs. It can be worth accepting a small net loss on a refine if it provides a major boost to one of these stats.
• Lock in Gains: It is often a good trade to accept a refine that results in a net negative if it promotes one of your stats to the next rarity tier (e.g., from Green to Blue), as that improvement is then permanently locked in.

When to Use Advanced Taming Marks: Save your rare Advanced Taming Marks. Their value is wasted on early tiers. They are best used on high-level pets when you are trying to make progress in the extremely difficult Epic (Purple) and Legendary (Gold) tiers, where progress with common marks becomes nearly impossible.