Armor


 * Not to be confused with Cosmetic Armor.

Armor is an attribute that reduces damage taken to health, but not shields. Not all enemies possess armor: Warframes, most bosses, and all Grineer do, but normal Corpus and Infested enemies do not have any. For your Warframe, its armor value is listed in the Arsenal. Armored enemies have their base armor values listed in the Codex but this value increases when they spawn with higher levels. Enemies with more than zero armor have their health bars displayed yellow instead of red; it is possible to strip away armor value through certain abilities or damage procs, turning those enemies' health bars back to red.

In the Damage 2.0 system, health bars always have a health type (flesh, cloned flesh, etc.) which decrease or increase incoming damage depending on damage type (,, etc.); armored entities have an additional type on their health called their armor type (either ferrite or alloy) that further decreases or increases incoming damage. This additional type is removed if the armor is stripped.

Effects
When damage is inflicted to an armored target, there are two related calculations made.


 * 1) The working armor value of the target is increased or decreased based off the damage type, armor type, and health type of the weapons and entities involved.
 * 2) Incoming damage is reduced by the type-modified armor value according to a damage reduction formula.

Armor Type Modifiers

 * See also: Damage 2.0

There are two types of armor, Ferrite and Alloy. Both are strong against damage and weak against. The main difference is in the elemental weaknesses, which are completely different. Ferrite armor is relatively common with low- and mid-level enemies such as Lancers and Troopers, and has generally weaker resistances than the more advanced Alloy Armor, which is used by Bombards, Napalm, and other bosses. Alloy Armor is also the armor type of Tenno.

Damage type modifiers inherently affect armor's effectiveness. They are given by the following equation:


 * Armor is your armor value before considering damage types.
 * Armor Type Modifier can be found on the nearby charts.

Apart from this armor value modification, type damage modifiers against the armor and health type of the target also plainly multiply the damage. There is a more accurate total damage calculation further down the page, but this section covers the armor value modification.

Damage Reduction Formula
The damage reduction from armor is as follows:

A net armor value of 300 will reduce incoming damage by, so only half of the weapon's damage is inflicted in total. At 600, you receive only 33% of a weapon's outgoing damage. At 900 armor, damage is divided by 4, and so on.

Effective Health
Effective health is the concept that each single point of health you have actually absorbs more than one point of damage, so you effectively have more hit points than indicated. Therefore, there are two ways that armor functionality can be imagined: either as a reduction to damage, or as an increase of effective health and incoming heals. An alternative way to think of armor transforms the above equation to the following:


 * Nominal Health means "health in name", referring to the Health points in your screen's upper right corner.
 * Effective Health becomes your "health in effect", reflecting a "truer" measurement of survivability.

An armor value of 300 will multiply the nominal health with 2, so the effective health will be double the nominal health. At 600 armor, it’s three times the nominal health, and so on. The effective health of a target against a certain damage type is:

The reason it is so important to understand effective health is because it allows you to compare the benefit armor provides to your survivability compared to the benefit that health provides, and it shows you that each additional point of armor increases your time to live by the same amount. While it is common for people to remark that "each point of armor gives you less damage reduction than the previous point", it is not an accurate sentiment&mdash;each point of armor confers linear, not diminishing, returns.

Mods
Steel Fiber and Armored Agility increase armor value when equipped. As a percentage modifier, Warframes with higher base armor values have a higher benefit from it. Like with most other stats, armor gains from mods stack additively together before being multiplied with the Warframe's base armor:


 * Mod Multiplier refers to the value on the mods equipped. It is 1.1 at max rank Steel Fiber, 0.45 at max rank Armored Agility, and 1.55 with both equipped.

Neglecting damage type modifiers, the relative increase in effective health from this mod is exactly proportional to the armor increase:

For example, for Warframes with the common base armor value of 65, a maxed Steel Fiber increases effective health by only about +19.6%, whereas the benefit of a maxed Vitality at level 30 is +246.7%. Valkyr, at 600 base armor, still only gets +73.3% out of a maxed Steel Fiber. However, the effective health increases from Steel Fiber apply as gains from sources of healing&mdash;that is to say, increasing armor increases the effective healing received, whereas simply increasing max nominal health does not.

Steel Fiber exists as a mod for sentinels too, while Kubrows can increase armor via Link Armor. The latter increases their armor by a percentage of the Warframe's total armor, which means that equipping Steel Fiber on a Warframe directly increases the armor of its Kubrow companion.

Warcry
Valkyr's Warcry increases the armor of all friendly units within range by 50%, or up to 142% with maximized Power Strength. This bonus is calculated additively with other base armor multipliers, such as Steel Fiber. A Valkyr with a max rank Steel Fiber and unmodified Power Strength increases her armor according to the following equation:







Hallowed Ground
Oberon's is Hallowed Ground, which places down a zone in which, among various other effects, the armor of Warframes is increased. This ability at maximum rank awards a 20% bonus to armor, which can be increased by Power Strength to a 58.6% bonus. This bonus is calculated additively with other base armor multipliers, such as Steel Fiber. An Oberon with a max rank Steel Fiber and unmodified Power Strength standing on Hallowed Ground has armor equaling:









Hallowed Reckoning
Oberon's Reckoning can be modified with the Hallowed Reckoning ability augment, which increases armor by a fixed value of 250 at max rank. Because this is a fixed value and not a percentage, it provides a greater protection to frames with minimal armor.



Ironclad Charge
Rhino's Rhino Charge can be modified with the Ironclad Charge ability augment, which increases his armor by 50%, or 142% with maximized Power Strength, for each enemy hit. This bonus is calculated multiplicatively with other armor modifiers, such as Steel Fiber. A Rhino with a max rank Steel Fiber and unmodified Power Strength that has charged through 5 enemies increases the armor according to the following equation:



In the above example, using Ironclad Charge against 5 enemies increases Rhino's damage reduction from 57.08% at 399 armor to 82.98% at 1463 armor.

Vex Armor
As shields are depleted while Vex Armor is active, Chroma's armor is increased by 350%. This is a total of 1250 before considering the effect of mods.

Warframe Armor and Effective Health
Unlike for health and shields, a Warframe's armor doesn't increase as it gains ranks. The Warframe armor type is Alloy and their health type is Flesh. Their armor health can never deplete as there are no permanent effects that remove Warframe armor.

While there is no such thing as a general effective health value, since effective health depends on the damage type the health is subjected to, a reasonable benchmark to compare the durability of Warframes is their effective health against equally distributed physical damage, i.e. equal portions of Impact, Puncture and Slash, since the vast majority of enemy damage against players is comprised of these types. Inserting these assumptions into the previous formula, we get:

As a meaningful PvE benchmark. For actual values, see the figure below.

Nominal Health vs Mitigation
Although both affect effective health and combine multiplicatively, one may have to decide between increasing nominal health or damage mitigation (i.e. armor or the strength of some damage mitigating abilities) in some builds. There are a few things to consider apart from the total gain in effective health:
 * Higher Mitigation will increase the amount of effective health you regain from heals that restore a fixed amount of nominal health points, e.g. red orbs, blue orbs with Equilibrium and life steal from Life Strike or Well Of Life.
 * Higher Nominal Health will increase the amount of energy you get out of the depletion of your health pool with the Warframe mod Rage.

Enemy Armor
Enemy armor values are displayed under the codex and infobox, but scale to the enemy's level. Generally, only Grineer and boss enemies have armor, while the Corpus and Infested factions do not have any. When the enemy health bars is yellow, armor is in effect and damage will be reduced and cause it to flicker red.

Scaling of enemy armor values uses the following formula:


 * Base Armor: Base armor value for the enemy.
 * Current Level: The level of your target enemy.
 * Base Level: This is the initial level an enemy can spawn. This is important because certain enemy types, such as Heavy Grineer, will not spawn until certain levels (like level 8 for Heavy Gunners), so while they may be level 30, their armor has only scaled up 22 times.



As mentioned before, this formula causes high level Grineer (lets say up from level 50) to be very hard to kill, as you can see in the example of a level 108 Heavy Gunner:









The resulting damage received by the Heavy Gunner is dramatically reduced to ~3.45% of original damage.

Removing Enemy Armor
There are several effects which reduce enemy armor. If a target's armor is reduced to 0, it loses its armor type. As such, damage inflicts significantly more damage to a weakly Ferrite-armored enemy than against one whose armor has ultimately been nullified, since apart from the armor mitigation, the +75% damage bonus is lost.

Corrosive Status Procs
status effects remove 25% of a target's current armor amount, permanently (except in Duels and Conclave, where it only lasts 8 seconds against other Tenno). As a result, each successive proc on the target removes less armor than the previous hit. Even though the armor value should theoretically never hit 0 like this, it does get removed when armor is reduced to below 1, due to rounding.

Corrosive Projection
Corrosive Projection is an aura mod of polarity that persistently reduces the armor of all enemies in the mission by 30%. If multiple cell members equip Corrosive Projection, their effects stack additively: 2 auras reduce enemy armor by 60%, 3 auras reduce enemy armor by 90%, and 4 auras completely eliminate armor from every enemy spawned in the mission entirely. There is no benefit beyond redundancy to having more than 4 auras, in the case of Trial missions with more than 4 cell members.

Terrify
-This ability, in addition to causing the affected enemies to flee, also reduces their armor by 20% for the duration of the effect(at max rank).

Seeking Shuriken
-This Ability Augment finds weaknesses in the target's armor, temporarily reducing its armor by 70% for 8 seconds(at max rank)