Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes features many different stats, each with a different purpose. While most are relatively straight forward, others have behind the scenes interactions which aren’t made clear to the players. This article will be looking at three of those stats; Armor, Resistance, and Defense, with the intent of making the relationship between the three easier for us all to understand.
Armor and Resistance on the Stat Screen
Armor and Resistance, as shown on the character stats screen, are relatively straightforward. The in-game description reads “Reduces the damage taken from abilities using Physical/Special Damage,” which is precisely what they do. Any incoming damage is reduced by the stated Armor or Resistance percentage.
Changing these stats however, is more complicated.
Armor and Resistance from Gear
Armor and Resistance both appear on gear, but as a flat value rather than a percentage. These flat values are, for all intents and purposes, a separate stat. There are many different names that could be used to distinguish between the percentage in the stat screen and the flat value from gear, but for the purpose of this article, we’ll use physical and special defense.
This divide is also what makes defense mods hard to judge – rather than directly increasing Armor and Resistance, they increase physical and special defense.
Converting Armor to Defense
There are a few ways to find out a characters special or physical defense. SWGOH.GG will tell you the values for a completely upgraded character. Adding all the increases from gear (and agility/strength) will tell you. But, the quickest way is to use a conversion formula.
| Defense = (Armor*(CharacterLevel*7.5))/100-Armor) |
The formula may look daunting at first, but it can easily be broken into smaller steps.
Using a completely upgraded General Kenobi as an example, it’s easy to check on SWGOH.GG, so let’s work through this.
The first step is to fill in the character level, and armor value – 85 and 37.72% respectively.
| Defense = (37.72*(85*7.5))/(100-37.72) |
Next, we calculate the deepest set of brackets – (85*7.5), which comes to 637.5.
| Defense = (37.72*637.5)/(100-37.72) |
Now we solve both remaining sets of brackets.
| Defense = (24046.5)/(62.28) |
And finally, we finish with the division, rounding down to the nearest whole number.
| Defense = 386 |
A quick look on SWGOH.GG confirms that this is accurate.
Knowing your Physical and Special Defense value allows you to theorycraft your mods to check increases and decreases without wasting credits moving mods around.
Of course, your Defense values aren’t really useful outside of theory crafting, so you need to convert it back. The formula for doing so is;
| Armor = (Defense*100)/(Defense+(CharacterLevel*7.5)) |
Rather than walk through it this time, I’ll break it down and explain why it’s so complicated, and why Defense and Armor/Resistance are both in the game.
| (CharacterLevel*7.5) |
This part reduces the amount of Armor gained from each point of Defense as your level gets higher. The benefits of leveling will far outweigh the change in scaling, but, it means that the small amounts of Defense a low level character can obtain is still valuable.
| /(Defense+ |
This part creates diminishing returns, which means the amount of Armor/Resistance you get for each point of Defense goes down as your defense goes up. This is present in virtually every game with a mitigation stat, because otherwise, it would be possible to reach 100% damage reduction, and wouldn’t be able to die. Diminishing returns also plays a large part in Defense mods under performing.
Summary
Now you know how to convert Defense to Armor, and vice versa, you can theorycraft another aspect of your characters mods. This is especially helpful for comparing the Effect Health Pool differences between two potential mod sets, since you don’t need to move mods around just to check the Armor difference. With the demise of popular mod optimizing websites, as well as changes to SWGOH.GG which prevent automatic mod data syncing, knowing how to optimize your mods manually is more important than ever.
