Armour Rating vs Resistance

It's an obvious question with no clear answer in-game. "If my armour gives me some resistance to a specific damage type, isn't that less effective than taking an armour rating that's higher in general?" I found out.

Intro

Helldivers 2 armour is one of the most confounding aspects of the game. Armour rating is hazy enough in its effect, when you add passive resistances to specific damage types it becomes pure conjecture.

At least speed and stamina have an obvious effect. With all the foot-slogging in the game, I wear light armour with the best speed and stamina available. With the new Acclimated passive giving 50% resistance to fire, gas, arc and acid damage, I decided to test my light armours and enforce the truth!

Testing Methodology

Light Armour Only

You might enjoy a leisurely stroll across an alien hellhole but I'd rather run, so I'm testing light armour only.

B-08 Light Gunner[helldivers.wiki.gg]
SC-30 Trailblazer Scout[helldivers.wiki.gg]
AC-2 Obedient (Killzone)[helldivers.wiki.gg]
I-09 Heatseeker[helldivers.wiki.gg]
EX-00 Prototype X[helldivers.wiki.gg]
AF-50 Noxious Ranger[helldivers.wiki.gg]

Gatria on Trivial

The proving ground for testing is Gatria. It has good visibility and on Trivial difficulty has no climatic conditions to interfere with armour.

Hellpod Opimization

Using Vitality Enhancement booster would interfere with health, for example. Hellpod Optimization shows that it's active in recorded video by the number of grenades you drop with, and it drops you with more which could save time.

Incendiary and Gas Grenade Test

I throw the grenade as close as possible without getting caught in the blast. This is to avoid explosive damage. I then run into the area effect and freeze, starting counting at the first damage tick. I stop counting at the last damage tick---usually when killed---and that gives Time To Kill (TTK). I test twice in total so I can average.

In play other sources of fire and gas damage might be more common, such as napalm barrage and gas strike, but grenades are quicker for a comparative test.

Tesla Tower Test

I call in the Tesla tower so I'm outside its radius, then I run in and freeze, starting counting at the first damage tick, stopping at the last. That's TTK, averaged across two tests in total as before.

Recording

I use Steam Game Recording for best accuracy, allowing me to recheck counts and enter them on a spreadsheet. Still allow for .5 seconds of inaccuracy though.

Results

Exported from spreadsheet.

• Results are in seconds.
  
• TTK of 0 indicates I did not survive any seconds. That's the Tesla tower for you.
  
• "DNK after X" indicates Did Not Kill after the number of seconds shown, which was the full duration of the effect. In short, DNK means I survived the test!

Conclusions

I won't describe armour passives by their name (Extra Padding, Acclimated, etc.). No-one ever remembers them so I'll describe the passives by their effect.

You can draw your own conclusions. These are mine. Remember they all apply to light armour:

• 50 vs 100 armour rating alone has no significant effect against these damage types. But it does have some effect so resistance passives on medium armour might be more useful. As for heavy armour, you'll never convince me to wear it unless they remove the stamina penalty!
  
• 50% resistance is useless against fire and arc damage. It's relatively useless against gas damage compared to the 80% resistance armour.
  
• 50% resistance armour does protect against acid too---untested here---but going by these results I doubt it's useful.
  
• 80% gas resistance allows you to loiter in gas. However, other than gas strikes, gas attacks don't have a large area of effect anyway.
  
• 75% fire resistance might allow you to loiter in fire but you'll be in low red health. With or without this passive you'll need to stim; this passive just gives you more time to do it.
  
• The Tesla tower one-shot-killed all but one of the tested light armour...
  
• 95% arc resistance is very effective, exactly what you'd hope for. You can take three bolts from the Tesla tower without dying, even in light armour. This could make a four-helldiver arc strategy quite exciting so hurry up and try it out.

Summary

In practice I find the 50% resistance passive is useless on light armour. 75% fire doesn't change the way you play either so is useless on light armour. There probably aren't enough sources of gas damage to make 80% gas resistance as useful as other passives. 95% arc resistance has potential for highly specialised strategies.

Although I didn't test 50% explosive resistance, based on the results above I expect the increased damage taken by light armour will undermine any resistance below 80%.

Passives that grant more stims or more grenades are much more tangible benefit to light armour than resistances, for example.

[неистовый пивococ]

50% explosive resistance is very good againt automatons (literally 70% of their attacks), bugs (bug vomit damage from all bile bugs counts both as explode and acid) and help you resist Overseers plasma AOE and grenades, so it's my #1 armor on automatons

[Pyrodysseus]

Doing these tests only with light armor and not even including explosive resistance is 10/10 stubbornness. You know you can pick where you drop right? You don't have to run anywhere when you test heavy armor smh