Armor instead of shields

[(PSN)northern_rebal]

I've  gotten some advice to concentrate on boosting armor and not shields. Sounded reasonable, but I'm still unsure.

I'm going to try it out, but what do you all think?

[actuallyVile]

Armor reduces incoming damage.

Shields...can end up being ignored or just disabled.

Armor ftw.

[Kainosh]

Armor is only good if you can heal yourself.  Yes. Just because of this.

If you cant (or don't want to) heal your frame, then it might be better going with shields...

 

Before LS and then Operator healing abilities, Shield regeneration were pretty valuable.....  Now your HP + Armor is a new shield that you regenerate manually.

[lukinu_u]

Basically, shield is a secondary health while armor give a damage reduction to your health.

Damage reduction is "armor/(armor+300)", which mean each armor point increase value of each health point by 1/300.
It mean increasing both health + armor is better than increasing health + shield or armor + shield, because health and armor interactions are multiplicative, which is more beneficial as the values become bigger.
 

Edited February 14, 2020 by lukinu_u

[NinjaZeku]

4 hours ago, (PS4)northern_rebal said:

concentrate on boosting armor and not shields

It depends on what you have available to you / what you're facing.

Early on, strengthening a layer of protection that regens on its own - and that enemies can't instantly break through - works pretty great.

But, as you progress, you gain more and more options to restore Health, as well as gain Armor even on Frames that are sorely lacking by default
(just don't use regular Armor Mods on e.g. Trinity or Zephyr lol).

Plus there's Toxin damage and Slash procs which straight-up ignore Shields.

So yeah, you generally get more out of Health at the end of the day.

[hyzmarca]

Boost health first.   All frames benefit from more health (except maybe hildryn).  After that,  the question of boosting armor depends entirely on the frame's base armor value.  In many cases,  attempting to use an armor boosting mod is just a waste of a slot and capacity,  because mods are percentile boosts and you need a decent amount of base armor to make them matter.   Don't bother boosting armor on frames that have very little base armor,  look for other forms of damage mitigation or avoidance,  instead. 

 

Eventually you'll get access to conditional armor increases,  like Arcane Guardian and Health Conversion.  These are absolute values and can get huge when stacked,  but aren't active all the time.  

[Slayer-.]

I like armour, I seem to be able to take more of a hit with it.