How Armor Works In Warframe?

[FallingHeaven]

I understand in concept what armor is.

But mathematically, how is armor related to health or shield? Under what circumstance would use of armor mod be justified?

This has always been bugging me because I always run out of mod slots.

[Stratego89]

Armor has no effect on shields, it only affects health.

 

Armor gives you a reduction in damage done to your health directly by attacks. More armor = more reduction. This does not reduce the damage of status procs such as bleed or poison- but DOES reduce the damage of the attack that caused them, indirectly lowering their damage.

 

Armor is a bit weird in it's damage reduction. 15 gives you barely any. from 15 to say 65 is a huge increase in reduction. From there to 115- the SAME amount of armor added on, you get less additional damage reduction. After a while it starts to "feel" more and more pointless to get additional armor. Eventually after a high enough amount though- it begins to become more effective again. Like I said- weird.

 

Point is. If you only have a small bit of armor- adding some on can be ok but honestly is a waste of a slot (15-65 armor) if you have 150 or more, adding more on can be decently effective as a choice, but is still not that great. With armor on par with chroma, frost, and valkyr- it's a definite worthwhile addition, and it can be effective to squeeze as much on as possible depending on how you fight.

[Robm]

Amor affects how much damage you take when your health is hit, not shields. Good for Valkyr, Atlas, and Chroma. A majority of warframes do not benefit from Armor mods. The only reason you would put it on Frost is to increase his snow globe.

Always put armor on Valkyr, she gets a huge boost from it. Maxed steel fiber on her brings armor to 1260.  

 

http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Armor

[JarkayPahnts45]

Armor affects health, not shield. It upgrades the amount of damage you can take per hit.

 

So, for example. Say you have 200 armor. You get hit for 5 seconds by a heavy gunner. Without armor mods, say you lose 1 point of health per 2 shots.

 

Put in a maxed Steel Fiber. now you have something like 500 armor. Same heavy gunner for 5 seconds, and you take 1 point of damage per 5-7 bullets (RNG makes exact datamining difficult, so this is all hypothetical.

 

Please note that you should only equip armor mods on frames that have other 180 armor, as otherwise its not worth it. Also, armor DOES NOT affect shields.

 

Good frames for armor mods:

 

Frost

Valkyr

Chroma

Excalibur

Saryn

Rhino (only if using Roar build, not Iron Skin build. Personal choice, make your own build that suits you.)

Good luck.

[DeMonkey]

The math for DR from armour off the top of my head is,

Armour/(Armour+300).

With 100 armour you have a DR of 25%

With 200 armour you have a DR of 40%

With 300 armour you have a DR of 50%.

[Caseph]

How much damage you take.

[[DE]Momaw]

In actual gameplay terms, and how much you can rely on armor to be useful, it might help to think of armor like this

 

AR  50 = 14% damage reduction = Effective health x1.16

AR 150 = 33% damage reduction = Effective health x1.5

AR 300 = 50% damage reduction = Effective health x2.0

AR 600 = 66% damage reduction = Effective health x3.0

AR 900 = 75% damage reduction = Effective health x4.0

AR 1200 = 80% damage reduction = Effective health x5.0

[Acos]

Armor mods (every mod, really) increases armor as a percentage of whatever your armor value is. That means that in order to get any real benefit out of them you need to have a lot of armor to begin with.

As an example, Valkyr without Steel Fiber has an armor value of 600, which translates to a 66.67% (6 repeating, all hail Satan) damage reduction to her Health. Meanwhile, someone like Nyx with a measly 15 armor only has 4.76% damage reduction. Throwing Steel Fiber onto Valkyr bumps her up to 1,260 armor, or 80.77% damage resistance. Nyx, however, only goes up to 31.5 armor, or 9.5% damage reduction. While Steel Fiber is a substantial increase for Valkyr, it's a complete waste of a mod slot on Nyx. 

 

As a general rule of thumb with mods; if a weapon or warframe has a good value in something mods can make it much better. If a weapon or Warframe has a low value in something they will just always be bad at that particular thing and nothing you can mod for will make it better. in this game you have to cover your weaknesses with your strengths. 

Keep in mind also that this game very heavily favors crowd control to tanking, and even the most armored Warframes can still die very quickly at higher levels where enemies are literally pouring out bullets from every conceivable angle. Things like Health, Shields, and Armor fall off very quickly as enemies damage continues to rocket upwards with level, where as Crowd Control powers never really go out of style. 

 

Edited December 30, 2015 by Acos

[Katinka]

Armour reduces the damage dealt to your health, making your health last longer.  There are two angles to look at this from:

1.  You can consider the percentage reduction and you'll find that the higher your armour the more you need to make a difference that sounds big as the damage reduction tends towards 100% but can never reach it.  I find this view to cause more confusion than it solves and doesn't really answer anything about how relatively survivable you are.

2.  You can flip it round and instead of considering how much it reduces each shot, consider how much more damage the enemy needs to lay into you.  You then get the incredibly simple result that every 3 points of armour gives you 1% more effective health.

 

Valkyr starting at 600 armour effectively has +200% of her maximum health.  With no mods at Rank 0 her 100 is effectively 300, at Rank 30 her 300 is effectively 900 and at Rank 30 with maxed Vitality her 740 is effectively 2220 because that is how much damage the enemy needs to do to kill her. 

Slap on a Maxed Steel Fiber, +110% armour or +660 points of armour, and effectively you add 220% more health, based on her actual total health, not base health.  So rank 30, max Vitality and max Steel Fiber, Val takes 3848 damage to her health before she falls.

Edited December 30, 2015 by Katinka

[FallingHeaven]

Hey, thanks guys

That helps me a lot.