I tested ALL ARMOR TYPES and PASSIVES in HELLDIVERS 2 so you don't have to if you don't want to

What do Armor Rating, Speed, and Stamina Regen stats on armor mean exactly? I've spent an inordinate amount of time attempting to translate these values into something meaningful. I have come up with very little in translating these stats into my testing data. However, I have come to understand how durable the armor types are, what the passives provide, how fast and how far they each can sprint, how quickly they recover stamina, and, most importantly, when compared, how they stack up.

PASSIVES TESTED:
Democracy Protects
Electrical Conduit
Engineering Kit
Extra Padding
Fortified
Med-Kit
Scout
Servo-Assisted

ARMORS USED IN TESTING:
CE-74 Breaker - explosions, throwing distance
FS-38 Eradicator - explosions, detection range
SC-30 Trailblazer Scout - combat, speed, stamina, detection range
B-08 Light Gunner - detection range
EX-00 Prototype X - arc damage
CE-35 Trench Engineer - combat, speed, stamina, grenade count (HSO Booster), detection range
CM-09 Bonesnapper - stim usage, stim count (HSO Booster)
TR-9 Cavalier of Democracy - not dying
SA-04 Combat Technician - detection range
B-24 Enforcer - explosions
FS-23 Battle Master - combat, speed, stamina, explosions
TR-62 Knight - throwing distance
B-27 Fortified Commando - explosions, OLD METHOD: combat, speed, stamina

MY DATA COLLECTION VIDEO:

MY GOOGLE SHEET FOR DATA BREAKDOWN:

REGINALD'S LASERMAXXING VIDEO:

UMBRAN'S STEALTH VIDEO:

ERAVIN'S STEALTH VIDEO:

ERAVIN'S TERMINID DETECTION RANGE VIDEO:

WULFRAYNE'S ORIGINAL ARMOR VIDEO:

WULFRAYNE'S FOLLOW-UP ARMOR VIDEO:

WULFRAYNE'S VITALITY ARMOR VIDEO:

OHDOUGH'S HELMET VIDEO:

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:25 Overview
00:53 Democracy Protects
01:53 Electrical Conduit
02:43 Engineering Kit
03:52 Extra Padding
04:09 Fortified
06:11 Med-Kit
07:22 Scout
10:58 Servo-Assisted
12:15 Testing Products
13:04 Speed & Stamina
19:33 Combat

[ManualReplica]

Here is how armor and health actually works:
Player base health is 90 HP, the Vitality Enhancer increases player health by 20%, bringing it up to 108 HP (it does nothing else).
Limb Health and Limb Injuries have absolutely no relation whatsoever to damage taken, and are entirely separate from your HP.
The base damage modifier for Torso is x1.0, Head is x1.5 and Arms and Legs are roughly x0.85 (limb damage modifier wasn't the main scope of our week of testing).

Unlike enemies, the player has an Armor Value (AV) of 0, meaning you can be damaged from any source.
Instead, players use Damage Resistance (DR) which is a % of damage blocked by incoming damage, and is not represented or conveyed properly at all by the armor "stats".
"Armor Rating" (AR) doesn't actually mean anything, it's fake UI element that's purely there to tell you if something has more or less "armor".

The actual table for AR translated to DR actually looks like this.
AR - DR - BLOCKED - RECIEVED
0 = 0% - x0 - x1.0
50 = 20% - x0.2 - x0.8
75 = 28% - x0.28 - x0.72
100 = 36% - x0.36 - x0.64
125 = 42.4% - x0.424 - x0.576
150 = 48.8% - x.0488 - x0.512
200 = 59.04% - x0.5904 - x0.4096

If you want to calculate damage and health for yourself to compare vs known damage sources, like the MP98 Knight SMG (which does exactly 50 WPN DMG), or to find out how much WPN DMG an enemy attack does you will need to screenshot your HP bar and divide it into 9 segments of 2 blocks each (90 HP total, each block representing 5 HP) for BASE HP.
To translate the segmented HP bar into Vitality Enhancement boosted HP, you instead interpret each block as 6 HP (12x9 = 108 HP).

You then screenshot your damaged HP bar, overlay it over your segmented bar to get your MISSING HP value (the amount of health LOST) and use it in this formula.

MISSING HP / RECIEVED = WPN DMG

The RECIEVED value corresponds to how much armor you have, so for the B-27 Fortified Commando, which has 200 AR (59.04% DR) the RECIEVED value will be 0.4096.
If you instead already know WPN DMG and want to calculate how much damage it will inflict (ie MISSING HP) value you reverse the formula.

WPN DMG x RECIEVED = MISSING HP

The JAR-5 Dominator does 200 WPN DMG, so if you shoot a 200 AR player in the Chest you will deal 81.92 damage (MISSING HP).

OBSERVE, your Head has 0 AR / 0% DR at all times, you don't have ANY protection on your head and will ALWAYS take 100% damage + Headshot multiplier (x1.5 or higher).
Your Cape for that matter also has 0 AR, and no stats of any kind, same as your Helmet.

REGARDING CRITS
There is no such thing as a "critical hit", not even for explosives.
The cause for "crits" is a visual error due to your local game Client having a disagreement with the game Server about the visual for projectiles and animation state for both the Player and the enemy attacking you. What this means is that, on your screen (your Client), it sometimes looks like an enemy shoots or hits you in the Chest for half your HP or more, or as if your character just survived a direct impact from a rocket to the Head, but on the Server side the attack hit elsewhere. The animation state on your Client does not always reflect what the Server sees either, on your end you are looking up or turning around, on the Server end your character is lagging behind and flinching or looking down while reloading or aiming and was just shot in the head. This is also why Bile Spewers and Hulk Scorchers can sometimes instantly vaporize you before their spray/fire even hits you.

You can actually recreate this Server-Client disagreement in other ways:
1) Spectating other players while you're dead, which immediately tells you that what you see and other players see is not the same.
2) Piloting a Mech and having another player stand on your mech while you walk around, the pilot will see the surfer float and lag around behind them, but the surfer doesn't.
3) Shoot very precise shots at a stationary player (easier if they do the Hug emote and hold their arms out) right at the edge of their model hitbox, which on the recieving players end visually looks as if they were "hit", with your bullet being stopped and a blood effect playing with no damage taken and on your end looks as if your bullet kept going past them.

FORTIFIED/EXPLOSIVE RESISTANCE & DAMAGE
Fortified provides 50% Explosive Resistance (x0.5) AFTER your armor DR% has been calculated.
Heavy Armor does in fact protect against explosives (but the damage is so high that you often can't tell), but wearing Heavy Armor with Fortified does not give you 98.8% Explosive Resistance. Instead it will first block 48.8% of the damage and then block 50% of the damage NOT blocked by your armor DR%.

So if a rocket does 250 WPN DMG (I don't know the exact damage of a rocket), it will deal 122 damage to someone with 150 AR / 48.8% DR, which will kill them.
But if they have Fortified, the game then takes that 122 damage and reduces it to 61. Also, rockets and shells have direct impact damage as well (which is not blocked by explosive resistance since it's a non-explosive damage type), which adds to the broad damage variance when being hit with explosives.

STAMINA
"Stamina Regen" is, just like "Armor Rating" a made up fake stat in the stats UI.
Stamina Regen is exactly the same for all armors (3.3 per second), and what it actually means is total Stamina.
Stamina Regen is only increased by the Stamina Enhancement booster (by 65%), which also increases your total Stamina by 30%.

CLASS - STAMINA - RECHARGE TIME TO FULL
Light - 125 - 9s
Light-Medium - 115 - 8s
Medium - 100 - 7s
Medium-Heavy - 75 - 6s
Heavy - 50 - 5s

Oh yeah also unrelated but brief on weapon AP:

Light Armor Penetration = 2 AP
Medium Armor Penetration = 3 AP
HMG/AMR/Autocannon, etc = 4 AP
Recoiless/Quasar, etc = 5 AP
Spear = 6 AP

Scavenger = 1 AV
Warrior = 2 AV
Hive Guard/Munitions Cache, etc = 3 AV
Scout Strider = 4 AV
Charger = 5 AV
Fabricator = 6 AV

AP < AV - No Damage / Deflection
AP = AV - Penetration at x0.5 damage (50%)
AP > AV - Penetration at x1 damage (100%)

You can deduce the full range of AP/AV values for all enemies and weapons with this, so gg have fun.

[stevebutters]

The entire point of the electrical defense armor, besides rumors of Illuminate arc weapons, is for when you finally convince one guy in the friend group to get the game, he plays for a while, then you hear "I just unlocked the arc thrower/tesla tower!" over the mic. Then... you put on your electrical defense armor.

[CharliMorganMusic]

I am loving these very scientific videos. Fuck tier lists. This is the real shit. Gathering data, testing hypothesis, etc. This is good shit. You've earned a subscription.

[billsmith]

I was doing a bot eradication the other day. I fucked up and wound up directly under a supply pod call in. The thing crushed me, full health wipe out. I stood back up. Democracy Protects indeed.

[Caleb_Cachagee]

Haven't heard "check the hypotenuse of a square" since HS math

[blm]

joel watching this ready to change every single stat you gave us here lol

[FusterCluck]

If a fellow helldiver shoots you with an arc based gun while you are wearing an electrical conduit armor, the arc leaps off from you to the nearest enemy. You literally become a conduit that allows the arc to pass through you, extending the arc's range.

[OverBlackSands]

I remember the devs talking that they made detection work "as it would in real life" as in the bugs can actually see and somewhat smell you, but the automatons mostly rely on vision as well as sound. They didn't go into specifics, but they made it clear that they had different ways of detecting the Helldivers

[Reginald-sctk]

All the details I needed on armor, served up. I've been hype for this video. Glad to see it released so I can watch it.

[xander]

this video was just really good and well executed, and conveyed the info in a digestible way can't make the video get more attention so here's some gratitude

[MoeHasubandoAbsolver]

I'm pretty sure the "stamina regen" stat is actually total stamina value, and stamina regens at a base rate. The reason I think so is that stamina regens to full much faster while wearing heavy armor than light armor, and depletes much faster in heavy armor than in light armor.

[Sovreign]

On one hand, I kinda hoped the helmets would have their own mini passives.

But on the other hand, having all the helmets be entirely aesthetic is probably better. There's no meta build or combination; you just look good!

[dddish]

electrical conduit is most useful in a team LOADED with electrical weapons

one arc thrower: not really helpful
MAYBE once per mission it will come up, you should have taken another passive

4 arc throwers: you are GOING to be hit by accident at LEAST once per engage ment
while you can maintain a fairly regular wall of death, any enemy that closes the distanec will result in someone being zapped.

the usefullness is directly proportional to the number of players taking eletrical weapons...

which means you probably shouldnt take it in random public games, where you probably arent that coordinated
but with friends??
absolutely powerful

[clutchbleach]

I love how you used other peoples research to create a more accurate video. You also gave everyone credit. Not to mention, there is absolutely no way i could do the math involved in this video. Overall, it was extremely impressive.

[overcomemortal]

The "critical hits" are not "criticals" they're just headshots. Yes the hit/hurt boxes are that inconsistent and armor (to my testing) does not reduce headshot damage.

[EvalithFoG]

Great video! The CEO responded to someone on Twitter asking about random crits "It's not a random crit. They hit your head. Look up to avoid getting headshot. Or dodge."
Don't think random critical hits are a thing

[Muekle]

I love how you are willing to go Super in depth on it all!

[bluicarys]

Ive got about 78 hours in, a little over 200 missions, and Democracy Protects has consistently been an absolute life saver, and in my opinion and experience with people calling drops on top of us, one of, if not the most useful boons.

[Folkeregor]

You are a top tier Helldiver content creator doing the most important work a player could ask for. Keep on keeping on!

[alanclack]

• Great numbers-based calculations.
• As in-depth in-game testing as possible!
• Credits given to other testers
• Information cleanly organized
• More advanced sheets for in-depth discovery
Absolutely solid and amazing work!

I hope this comment helps you identify that this content is really valuable and enjoyable. Hopefully Arrowhead expands on the mechanics a bit and you're able to keep up with it and hopefully also don't mind it being integrated into Wikis and/or guides for the community.

Regardless I'm looking forward to getting a better idea of how things work and applying this advanced knowledge in the battlefield!

As a 🗺GIS person by industry it was also a delight to see QGIS used for some other analysis in another video, major props!!