Balancing - Speedster Armor Rebalancing (2024)

There will be a relatively long explanation and comparison between other gear at the start so the actual changes will be listed in bold.

Speedster Armor is pretty underused right now, and really due for a buff, the last change to the set was all the way back in 2019. To see why, let’s compare it three similar armor sets, those armor sets being Farm Armor, Melon Armor, and Young Dragon Armor.
I’ve chosen these sets because Speedsters main gimmick as a set is well… SPEED. And speed in this game for grinding is really only important for two things, farming and combat (if you’re grinding specific mobs).

Let’s start with young dragon armor, so you can get the set off the auction house for about 1.9m lbin clean, and for speedster it’s around 2m~ lbin but if you’re lucky maybe 900k-1m through auctions. Not entirely worrying yet but if we compare stats…
Young has the following over Speedster Armor;

• 350 more HP
• 150 more Defense
• Higher Rarity
• 0-70 more Speed (from the ability)
• +100 Speed Cap

So these two sets cost roughly around the same, however Young Dragon is vastly superior in terms of combat. What about with farming sets?

It’s established the 1-2m price range for speedster, it’s 2.5m in materials generally. Now Melon Armor off auction is around 6.5m (7.5m in materials) and Farm Armor is only 500k~ lbin (192k in materials, the wheat collection requirement is a big block to getting it but you can always ask for someone to craft it for you).
Now if we wanna talk about pure numbers, then technically speedster is gonna be beating Farm Armor for earlygame farming (farm armor has 40ff advantage while speedster has 55 speed over it. 180/125=1.44 and 44% more blocks broken per second. Of course higher speeds will fudge that ratio but the % improvement of farming fortune will not be anywhere close to 40%, since earlygame you get speed much slower than farming fortune), however it seems that generally players don’t perceive speedster as an upgrade despite the fact that it really is.

I brought up Melon Armor as well because the optimal farming fortune upgrade path right now excluding Speedster is actually Farm Armor -> Melon Armor. Or a 500k -> 6.5m price jump. If you wanna be picky you can mention farm armor with farmer boots, however since you get farming fortune instead of speed with them on the garden, it’s a similar situation to Speedster where Full Farm Armor is better due to the BPS increase of 15 speed. Specifically I think this price jump shows a nice place where we can put Speedster Armor to make it relevant again, and now I segway into the changes

Note: I refer to speed increase as BPS increases across the board, people acutely aware with optimal farming would realize this isn’t necessarily true because of certain speed combinations and angles resulting in maximum blocks broken per second at low speeds (such as 93). I am very aware of this, however this balancing change is targeting the broad playerbase, of which most early game farmers won’t know about the different farming methods you can do to get optimal BPS at low speed. Even then for some crops like Pumpkin, there isn’t an accessible design for early game players that lets you get high bps with low speed. The default plot for instance requires 250-260~ for optimal blocks broken per second. This balancing change is targeting those players, for all intents this is a blocks broken per second improvement for them.

Now onto the changes…

• Speedster Armor Recipe
  • 24 Enchanted Sugar Cane > 1536 Enchanted Sugar
  • 60% price reduction, recipe now has 1 stack of enchanted sugar in each slot instead of 1 enchanted cane.
    • This should put it right above Farm Armor in price. To be noted is that I want the jump to Melon Armor to not be a microscopic increase, which is why I chose to reduce Speedster’s price than make it significantly better than Farm Armor.
• Speedster Base Stats
  • 0 > 7 Farming Fortune by Default on each Armor Piece.
    • Not a clean number, ew… Anyways I think farming fortune should be added so that players think “Hmm, might this set be good for farming?” rather than just completely pass it up. I also want it to be similar to Farm Armor’s farming fortune but not outright better.
    • For an elaboration of why I believe it shouldn’t just be better, I think if a player sees both Speedster and Farm it could lead to an “aha!” moment. Sure you get ‘less’ crops, but the speed increase means you farm more crops in that time frame, so it’s actually MORE crops. You get the same end effect (Speedster being better for farming), with a nice little player micro interaction.
• Speedster Armor Requirement
  • Farming LVL Requirement 0 > 12
    • Farm Armor has a requirement of 10, so just a little bit more since it’s meant to be a little bit better.
• Armor Ability Revamp
  • New Tiered Bonus: Cane Fanatic
    Grants 2.5 Speed for Every 2nd Sugarcane Milestone you have (up to 16).
  • 0.625 Speed for each Armor Piece you wear.
    • Yucky numbers I know, but IMO anything is better than it’s current ability of just “here’s 20 speed” and nothing else. I wanted to not change the overall speed amount which is how we got here. Milestone 16 is 143,160 cane farmed, which is still 100,000 less than what you’d get naturally by going for it with the new crafting recipe. If you grinded for it then GG! free 20 speed right away, but if you’d rather buy it, then you can still copp out and only get to milestone 14 (53k cane) and only suffer 2.5 less speed. It’s the best of both worlds. Also 53k sounds like a lot to a new player, but as someone who started a new stranded profile recently and did a bit of cane farming, it can’t take more than 15 minutes with beginner gear.
    • Looks like I forgot to mention why it’s a tiered bonus rather than full set. I chose this so that you can use Farmer Boots if you so please.

With all the new changes, the armor set would look like below.
View attachment 3356401
I’m open to feedback. Feel free to leave some if you have any.