How to defense equate to HP and damage dealt?

"Dwinkelm;61113" wrote:
I've been seeing a lot of talking about the stealthed buff to defense/armor, or whatever we're calling it these days. A lot of the posts say something along the lines of "well an increase to defense by X% is really an increase to effective HP by Y%," or talk about the effective increase to protection. How are people calculating this?

Also, is there a more clear and concise definition for defense? If a character has 30% defense, does that mean they suffer 30% less damage from incoming attacks? Or is it more complex than that?

I've hunted around a little bit but can't find an adequate answer to these questions. All replies appreciate, thanks in advance!

Firstly, let's be clear about the terms. Defense covers both armor (physical damage) and resistance (special damage). If you have a mod which adds 10 defense (flat number) this will add 10 to both armor and resistance. Let's consider only armor in these explanations. Resistance works exactly the same but applied to special damage.

The armor flat stat is currently hidden, lets call this the armor rating. In your stats window for each character, you will see armor as a reduction percentage. This is an important concept to understand:
Armor rating is converted to a reduction % via a formula. We don't know the exact formula but it is clear that the formula is subject to diminishing returns. A character at 200 armor rating gains less damage reduction for each added point of defense than a character at 100 armor rating.

The flat armor rating can be found here: https://swgoh.gg/characters/stats/

Select the defensive tab and you can see the armor / resistance values for lvl 80 max geared toons.

How do mods interact with defense and damage reduction?

> Flat defense e.g. +10 defense, is added onto the flat armor/resistance rating which is then reflected as a damage reduction % by the above mentioned formula.

> % defense e.g. +11.25% defense, is calculated based on the unmodded flat armor/resistance rating. Again, this is reflected as a damage reduction % by the formula.

How does someone calculate effective hp taking damage reduction into account?

Suppose you have enough armor to reduce damage taken by 50%. What this means is that for any incoming damage, you can now take twice the amount of hits before you are killed. So this is (within reasonable assumptions) equivalent to having twice as much hp.

The formula to calculate effective hp percentage: 1 / (1 - dmg reduction %); in the above example = 1 / (1 - 0.5) = 2 or 200%

This means that whether I choose to have either 50% damage reduction, or add 100% hp, mathematically, the results are the same. This lets us perform a comparison as to whether defense or health is better for a given level of itemisation (e.g 5% health vs 5% defense).

Defense mods vs Health mods - Prior to the defense update

Fives has one of the highest base armor in the game. So let's use him as the best case example:
The defense set bonus gives 5% defense. We are basically comparing 5% defense to 5% health. Factors to consider are that defense affects both protection and health by mitigating damage. Health % increase only affects the health pool.

The Diamond shaped mod has a fixed defense % bonus which every competitive player will have. Lets assume this is always on the character. Fives has a damage reduction of 27.18% with only this mod equipped.

Adding 5% defense changes the physical damage reduction from 27.18% to 28.06%.

This means before, Fives takes 72.82% of incoming physical damage.

After the set bonus is added, Fives takes 71.94% of incoming physical damage.

This added defense essential means he takes 71.94 / 72.83 = 98.8% of the damage he would otherwise have taken without the set bonus.

This means he his effective hp pool (prot + health) is 1.2% greater.

So for defense to be better under these conditions, 101.2% of health + protection needs to be more than 100% of protection + 105% of health.

When you work out the inequality, the defense is only better once we reach protection levels 3 x that of health. Even with max protection mods, it is almost impossible to reach these levels of protection with fives currently.

Special damage calculations make the ratios even more pronounced since resistance is almost always less than armor by default. Of course, other considerations like % health effects, healing also have an influence.
Btw, 5% defense on fives, equates to about 18 flat defense, it is significantly less for most other toons.

TLDR: Health is technically better in almost all cases. However, when you look at the absolute differences, you are looking at several 100 hp difference in the most extreme case scenarios. Hence, practically, just use whatever is more convenient for you.

Wow lots of information there, definitely helpful, so thank you! Obviously there was the caveat that your example with Fives is pre-buff to defense. I was really hoping that armor rating/defense/damage-reduction had simply been reduced to a single stat, but it sounds like that's still not the case.

I've actually had some pretty good success running critical avoidance mods (primary slot) for my tanks with some success, as opposed to any health or defense bonuses.