What is Boss Armor?

[我能尝到你]

I've heard of "boss armor" before, but I don't really know what it is. Can someone help explain what is boss armor please?

[Rio]

Boss reduces the damage you do to it, so the fight lasts longer.

Like if you go into a hush fight or ultra greed fight and take off 1/20 of the hp in seconds then the damage you do slows down to a tiny bit that barly makes the hp bar move.

[MerseyRockoff]

A mechanic that doesn't allow you to instantly murder game's main bosses with an overpowered build. Simply put if you deal 100 damage per hit and the boss have 1000hp, it will not die from 10 hits, instead it will develop armor that absorbs damage, making you spend time in the boss fight and actually learn boss patterns no matter what. Of course, there are items, like mom's knife, which can still shred bosses with armor.

[SrCalavera94]

Here are couple of extra facts, bombs are armor piercing now, and do 100 damage, you can check the wiki to know how much hp end game boses have, Hush has 6666 so he takes 67 bombs to kill. The armor is effective to stop single target high damage atacks, but is not that that good at stoping rapid hitting mid damage atacks, or multiple sources of high damage. So a build with low tears but high damage is not gonna delete end game bosses no matter what.

[HeraldOfOpera]

Worth mentioning that the term "boss armor" is no longer accurate, as there are now regular enemies with it.

[E3kHatena]

Essentially the game adds a damage resistance factor to the enemies and bosses with the armor in an attempt to standardize the general length of the battle between runs and the amount of damage Isaac can output at a time.

[Sleepy-Keyzer]

Armor that Bosses wear

[The Noise]

To use a term from enter the gungeon real quick, it’s effectively a damage per second cap, and if you exceed that cap, the damage you do is lowered. So for high power builds it’s better to burst fire instead of giving the boss everything you’ve got

[我能尝到你]

Ah ok, thanks for telling me. I've heard that Ultra Greedier didn't have boss armor (Now he does in Repentance.), and that was the first time I've heard that, so I've just been wondering what is boss armor ever since.

[KliPeH]

Originally posted by SrCalavera94:

Here are couple of extra facts, bombs are armor piercing now, and do 100 damage, you can check the wiki to know how much hp end game boses have, Hush has 6666 so he takes 67 bombs to kill. The armor is effective to stop single target high damage atacks, but is not that that good at stoping rapid hitting mid damage atacks, or multiple sources of high damage. So a build with low tears but high damage is not gonna delete end game bosses no matter what.

To add to this, fires also ignore armor, and not only that, they also absorb enemy shots which leads to some very powerful builds.

[Juno Brier]

Another way of looking at it is that it forces you to learn how to dodge the boss's attacks. Unless, of course, you have a build that lets you revoke their projectile privileges.

[NW/RL]

Boss armor, which used to only apply to bosses but now has been sprinkled on other enemies, is a way to stop the player from nuking bosses instantly with powerful builds. Bosses like hush and ultra greedier have these resistances so you can't waltz through them

That being said, I need to find a mod to turn them off because it's artificial difficulty for no good reason

[Nubarique Joe]

So, if I transform into Guppy and/or have Mulligan or anything else that generates flies or spiders and makes them stronger, in theory it is more effective against such tanky armored bosses than simply high damage shots? Death from thousand cuts, so to speak.

[Wanderer312]

Funnily enough in Gungeon if a shot deals more than 1K damage in one hit it'll bypass the armor(makes something like Makeshift cannon very OP in that game) not sure if a system like that exist in Isaac though.

[UwU]

Originally posted by Wanderer312:

Funnily enough in Gungeon if a shot deals more than 1K damage in one hit it'll bypass the armor(makes something like Makeshift cannon very OP in that game) not sure if a system like that exist in Isaac though.

Well, with high dps and good items you can melt bosses in seconds. So it kinda exist?

[zverozvero]

If blast dont kill boss outright not sure if even First shot will be taken at its flat value. But Makeshift cannon effect exists if approached from entirely oposite direction (as was mentioned with knife). If tear does fraction of base damage in rapid succession like Trisagion armor just falters. Trisagion with any spliter effects like parasite, fracture or even Lachryphagy will ignore dps cap protection and with some tear ups destroy any 'bossarmored' boss (even ones immune to Chaos card) in few seconds scaling with damage ups unhindered.