Overwatch – How Armor Affects Shield Health

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Armor hit points reduce incoming damage, and shield regenerates. According to this reddit post, shield depletes before armor, and one reddit commentor describes this effect to be extremely useful:

Torbjorn armor put on Zarya effectively turns her large shield pool into an armor pool, because shields deplete before armor, but armor provides the reduction as long as it's in your health pool.

But is this actually the case? It doesn't make much sense for armor to cause damage reduction to shields, however, if it does, that's definitely an interesting synergy.

Best Answer

So for this, we tested using Zarya's self-damage on her secondary fire since we only had two people. Let's establish the expected behavior:

No armor.

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That's 23 damage dealt to Zarya without armor.

Now, let's get to the meat of the question.

With armor, damage on shields.

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This is also 23 damage dealt to Zarya's shields while she has armor from Torbjorn's armor pack. But let's give it one more trial.

With armor, damage on armor.

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269 - 254 = 15 damage dealt to her armor. While this is a bit more than the expected 5 damage reduction, it's still reduced damage which means that self-damage is mitigated by armor.

Conclusion

This means that we can definitively state that, at least for now (6/30/2016), the damage reduction provided by armor does not apply to shields.

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