In my last (guest) article, I talked about comparing offensive stats in SWGoH. This time, we’ll be looking at defensive stats – health, protection, and defense, and how they combine to create a characters Effective Health Pool (EHP).
Before anything else, let’s have a quick look at defense. Like offense, defense works behind the scenes to determine another stat; armor. The exact relationship between the two is currently unknown, but testing at level 80 showed us that it suffers from diminishing returns – as your defense goes up, the amount of armor you get from it goes down. Armor, express as a percentage value, mitigates incoming damage – if you have, say, 10% armor, you only take 90% of any incoming damage.
So, we have a stat that reduces the damage we take, and two stats that determine how much we can take, let’s put them together to find out how much damage we can really take.
The equation we need for this is (HP+Prot)/(1-Armor), which is much simpler than last time. To break it down, we need to add our health and protection to give us our total health pool, reverse our armor value (expressed as a decimal) to get our damage taken, and divide our health pool by damage taken. Now, I’m going to use the stats from a Shoretrooper on my arena shard – 33,888 health, 60,573 protection, and 37.59% armor – to provide an example.(HP+Prot)/(1-Armor) becomes (33,888+60,573)/(1-0.3759). 
We’ll do both sets of brackets as one step here, bringing us to (94,461)/(0.6241), leaving us to divide, finishing with an effective health pool of 151,307. Again, this is how much damage needed to kill this Shoretrooper, and doesn’t consider any healing.
To tell you the truth, protection is by far the best defensive stat on mods when it comes to primaries, because the percant increase is so much higher – you can hit +94% protection just from primaries if you try. But, like with our offensive stats, defense is worth more as prot/hp goes up, and vice versa, so it’s worth checking for secondaries.
As with last time, setting up a calculator will make checking faster, but because it’s so much simpler this time, I’m not going to make one for you. Happy modding!
PsychoPoet – Guest Writer
Who taught you how to do math?
You don’t divide by damage taken, you multiply by defense percentage.
(HP+PROT)*(1+Defense%)
(33,888+60,573)*(1+0.3759) = 129968.8899 effective HP.
I don’t know how you came to this conclusion, but it’s wrong. Defense% reduces incoming damage, that’s how it effectively increases Health and Protection, and it’s why we divide by damage.
As a simplified example, 100,000 combined health and prot with 50% defense. Incoming damage is reduced by 50%, letting you take twice as much damage.
(100,000)/(1-0.5)=(100,000)/(0.5)=200,000.
By your formula; (100,000)*(1+0.5)=(100,000)*(1.5)=150,000.
Blocking half the incoming damage doesn’t let you take 50% more, it lets you take 100% more.