Anyone tested HP vs Def for tanks?

I've been wondering this myself, but since there are also stats that counter defense (and I don't believe it can go below 0), HP or protection seems the better choice to me. Pure speculation though.

HP, HP, HP, HP. Far, far, far and away HP.

Take a look at the Defense on your tanks, then take a look at the Defense on your non-tanks. There's only a very, very small difference. Old Daka has 11% Armor, Royal Guard has 12%, Luminara has 15%. All the defenses range between about 10% and 15%. The 15% increase from the Defense mod bonus is multiplicative, not additive, meaning if your armor is 15%, you get 15% of 15%, for a total increase of 2.25% to your soak.

Right now the main practical difference between tanks and non-tanks is that tanks have significantly higher HP. So anything that adds a percentage of base HP will totally outstrip any gain from something that increases base Defense.

Idk my fives is sitting at 30k hp with 30% armor, true he's in all hp mods right now but can't help wondering what that armor dmg reduc would be with some maxed def mods, anyone know how much defence translates into armor stat?

As a secondary question should I slot my tank with a mod for 20% protection or 15% crit avoidance, while the protection sounds huge I can't help thinking that Rey etc missing crits might be better than the raw protection stat

Protection primary stat is double what health is. For a tank, always take protection over health imo. I have my RG modded w/ 6 def. mods for 3 def. bonuses. 1 of the def. mods is crit reduction, the rest r defense and protection . He has 40% mitigation, 110k prot/health together and can withstand an awful lot. Obnoxious really.

I actually am looking for what defence actually means, I equipped 3 sets of def mods on a char and only saw a 3% increase in armor, yet he saw a 6% increase when I added a mod with 20 defence stat on it.... What does defence exactly mean and control?

"Durrun;563946" wrote:
I actually am looking for what defence actually means, I equipped 3 sets of def mods on a char and only saw a 3% increase in armor, yet he saw a 6% increase when I added a mod with 20 defence stat on it.... What does defence exactly mean and control?

I'm taking an educated guess here because we've had both halves of the thing, but only had one half at a time.

Before the patch Resistance and Armor were expressed as flat numbers, off the top of my head I think "good" Armor was rated at about 100 or so, but my memory isn't very good there. We didn't know what 100 Armor meant in real terms, though. Now we know the percentage of soak your armor gives, but we don't know the flat numbers that go into creating that percentage. So does 100 armor equal 15%? Does it equal 10%? Even if we knew the exact numbers we still wouldn't know the formula because it's probably not a linear conversion, and it's entirely possible that some characters just get a flat bonus tacked on at the end as a character feature.

But, all that said, making an educated guess I would say the +20 defense gave a higher increase because it goes into the first part of the formula, which determines the percentage of soak given. Since that's a lower number, adding 20 would represent a very large increase--as I said, I remember 100 being good, so 120 would naturally be a pretty high jump. The percentage increases are added not to the number that determines the percentage, but rather to the percentage itself. So if you had (using totally made-up, hypothetical numbers here) 100 armor giving 10% soak and added three sets of Defense mods you would still have 100 armor, but your soak would now be 11.5%.

"Durrun;563684" wrote:
Idk my fives is sitting at 30k hp with 30% armor, true he's in all hp mods right now but can't help wondering what that armor dmg reduc would be with some maxed def mods, anyone know how much defence translates into armor stat?

Oops! I didn't see this before going to bed. Anyway, take the HP, leave the canoli. My 5s isn't developed enough to see that kind of armor, so I didn't look at him when I posted my original response. But it still holds unfortunately true--if you have 30% soak and slot 3 defense sets you're going to end up with 34.5% soak, which means you're taking roughly 5% less damage per hit (rounding up, even, because I'm good with patterns but bad with math). So if you got hit for 5000 damage you would take 250 less than you would without those mods...... By comparison, if your 5s has even just 20000hp without mods equipped, you're gaining 3000hp from the set bonuses.

3000hp is way better than 5% further damage reduction.

Long story short: Unless there's an update that reworks how defense is calculated and applied, don't bother trying to min-max it. Because whatever effort you put into boosting defense can just as easily and far more efficiently be applied to HP.

Thank you @NicWester very concise and informative, thanks for the info and thorough response :)

Yeah, I was curious, too. I really wanted Defense to be good :P