Can someone please explain how defense works?

"Huatimus;959049" wrote:

"Vertigo;958935" wrote:

"Josh_K;958930" wrote:
It doubles his modded armor. This is a lot of damage reduction. He can easily get to the 60% damage reduction level with average modding.

Use the calculator in the post above, to work out what your modded armor/resistance is by matching the percentage reduction from your stats screen and reading out the flat number the calculator gives you. Now double the flat number (if it was 400, use 800) and enter it back into the calculator and it will give you the resultant damage reduction that sith trooper will have in combat. Use 2.5x if you want to simulate for Defense Up,

Does the defense ever cap at some point? Like if he has 30% base armor, doubles it to 60% defense and then gives himself Defense up wouldn't that give him effectively 90% armor? Or does defense up only go off of base armor which would be 75% total damage reduction.

Defense and damage reduction is 2 different things, how did you read the links and not understand that? Giving 100% bonus to the defense doubles up the defense value but it does not double your damage reduction because of the 'diminishing' returns. You have to actually input the values to the defense calculator to check how much it benefits each specific character.

Since you are so interested in Sith Trooper, let us look at his stats and see the effects of his unique.
As max level, his defense is 264 according to swgoh.gg.
His damage reduction comes up to 264/(264+(85*7.5)) = 29.29%.
If you doubled his defense, 528/(528+(85*7.5)) = 45.31%
So you can see that there is diminishing returns and that there isn't a need for any cap since it will never hit 100%.

Ok, thank you for that, that was super helpful. I read both of those links posted above, but didn't see anything specifically about how the diminishing returns worked. The calculator is nice and all, but I wanted to know how the calculator worked, not just get the number out. Probably just skimmed over it too quickly.