Armor


 * Not to be confused with Cosmetic Armor.

Armor is an attribute that reduces damage taken to health. Not all enemies possess armor: Warframes, most bosses, and all Grineer do, but normal Corpus and Infested enemies all have zero. 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 entitles 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.

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


Damage inflicted to health points is mitigated according to the following formula:

This asks how much net damage is inflicted, if a certain amount of gross damage is applied. As armor increases, the denominator increases and an inversely proportional relationship

An armor value of 300 will divide the gross damage by, so only half of the gross damage is inflicted as net damage. At 900 armor, damage is divided by 4, so only a fourth of the gross damage is inflicted as net damage, 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 truly have more hit points than indicated. Therefore, there are two ways how the armor functionality can be imagined: either as a reduction to damage, or as an increase of effective health. 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.

Increasing Armor
Currently, the only ways to increase your Warframe's armor involve a single mod and a handful of ability effects.

Mods
Steel Fiber is currently the only mod in the game that increases a Warframe’s armor value. As a percentage modifier, Warframes with higher base armor values have a higher benefit from it. Neglecting damage type modifiers, the relative increase in effective health from this mod is:


 * Steel Fiber Multiplier refers to the value on the mod equipped. It is 0.1 unranked, or 1.1 at maximum rank.

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 your armor increases the effective healing you receive, whereas simply increasing your max nominal health does not.

Steel Fiber (Sentinel) exists as a mod for sentinels. Kubrows can increase armor via Link Armor, which increases their armor by a percentage of your Warframe's total armor&mdash;this means that equipping Steel Fiber on your Warframe directly increases armor on your Kubrow.

Abilities
Valkyr’s Warcry, Oberon's Hallowed Ground, Rhino’s Ironclad Charge and Chroma's Vex Armor are all abilities which boost Warframe armor for a duration of time when used.

Warframe Effective Health
The armor value of Warframes is always the same for that Warframe, and the armor type is Alloy and their health type is Flesh. Their armor health never depletes. 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.

High Nominal Health vs High 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, which is relevant for the damage formula, as Armor Type Modifier no longer applies. 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 Projection
Corrosive Projection is an aura mod 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 to bringing more than 4 auras, in the case of raids with more than 4 cell members.