Beetle Leggings

Head and legs are fixed. The decision is the chest, and it turns this into either an aggressive set or a defensive one. Both versions are built on top of a complete Turtle armor set, so making either consumes the previous tier, and owning both means farming a second turtle chest as well. Decide before you craft rather than after.

Beetle Might builds while you land melee hits, stepping up in stages to a cap, and feeds melee damage and attack speed. There is a damage floor built into it: if your sustained output is low, the buff never starts at all. It also decays faster the longer you go without connecting, so it rewards weapons that stay on target instead of big slow swings with gaps between them.

The speed half is the interesting part and it only pays on weapons that genuinely fire faster when swung faster. The Terra Blade is the standard example. Most swords that throw a projectile do not speed that projectile up at all, so on those the bonus is close to wasted unless you are fighting inside melee range anyway.

Beetle Endurance works the opposite way. Stand there without being hit and beetles appear one at a time, each adding a slice of damage reduction, up to three of them. Every hit you take strips one off. So it is a buffer that regrows during the fight rather than a shield that runs out and stays gone.

At full stack this is the highest reduction available before Moon Lord, and it stacks with everything outside the armor. Add a Worm Scarf and an Endurance Potion and you are taking well under half of what you otherwise would. Add a Frozen Turtle Shell at low health and you barely take anything at all.

With a Lifeforce Potion up and the stack full, it is even possible to live through a hit from the Dungeon Guardian, which nothing else at this stage manages. The tooltip does overstate the effect, though. The beetles do not block hits, they shave a portion off each one.

Turtle armor gives unconditional reduction and reflects damage back at whatever hits you. Neither version of this set does either. The offensive chest actually has less defense than the turtle set it was crafted from, and the defensive chest has the weakest offense of any Hardmode melee set, below even Molten armor. What you buy is specialization: you can push either direction much further than the middle option allowed.

If you take the defensive chest, expect to do less damage with a melee weapon than you would with a ranged or magic weapon of the same tier. That is not a fault in your build, and swapping weapon class while keeping the armor for survivability is a normal thing to do.

The highest defense at this point in the game does not come from the pure set at all. Keep the defensive chest and swap the head and legs for a Hallowed Mask and Valhalla Knight's Greaves and you beat it, with better melee bonuses attached.

With the defensive chest on and nothing in the social slot, wings only render while you are airborne, which catches people out when they think their wings failed to equip. This is the only armor in the game with two chest options.