So, wondering how badly I shot myself in the foot here. I came to subeta from neopets, where the speed stat is useless, so when I started training my battle pet here, I ignored his speed. You can see his stats here. I'm closing in on 2000 for strength, defense, and health, but his speed is currently sitting at just over 300. How screwed would I be continuing to ignore his speed? Is it possible to have a build that compensates for that? I recently started training another pet, and I'm going to keep his stats all even, including his speed until I better know what I'm doing, but he's a long ways off comparatively, so I'm just looking at my options in the meantime.

speed relates to critical hits on subeta. critical hits double the amount of damage done to your pet. when your opponent's speed is higher than yours, chances of you being crit hit is higher.

if your speed is significantly lower, one option for you could be to increase your defense to lower the damage taken. increasing your health may help too.

i would suggest to just increase your speed though unless you're going for an odd build.

Calling that has a high end pet with no speed, or even defense for that matter

Honestly, you can probably do fine without it. What someone will call an odd build another will probably call a strategic one. You can probably do fine without most stats though, depending on your play style. As opposed to your other stats, speed is either on or off during a battle. You'll still win fights if it's off. I had low speed for the longest time and it wasn't an issue. However, it's a comfort stat and critical hits are an interesting game mechanic. All in all, I'd recommend you train speed, but if you don't you won't be stuck in a place where you can't beat some opponents

I have one pet with high speed that had an easier time with opponents because he wasn't crit hit and could crit hit opponents to end battles faster. My other pet has low speed but high health so most of the crits don't kill him but he's still only T11. My third pet is going to be a defensive build and have really high defense. Right now he's still only at 800, but it will be interesting to see when he has much more defense if he will have a hard time with opponents. From what I've seen with slaglord and what I've seen with my speedy pet that has low strength, if your opponent's defense is greater than your pet's attack you won't crit hit.

I think you'll be fine either with having higher health or higher defense to make up for the speed

You have a long way to reach T13 or the cap, so you can always use exp and tomes to catch up on speed if you decide to. Also, you'll need at least 3k speed to have benefits for some weapons and scrolls (such as Unstable Fairy scroll, or Captured Eternal Flame), and even more to outspeed the high end challengers. It's feels like all or nothing regarding these.

As others suggested, it recommended to have a more rounded build for your first pet. You can also use whatever boosts on it, including Oracle quests and random events which raise random stats. For additional ones, you can try new builds out.

Yes, I have a capped high HP build, and in general it's able to tackle the opponents without difficulty. Some opponents which boosts quickly like Careaper are more challenging when it takes longer to wear them down with lower str and fewer crits. In any build though, intel will be very helpful. For example, having more freezing scrolls will save you a bunch of headache doing or recovering from damage.