- Health or HP is your total life + shield + armour.
- Life is simply a number that represents how much damage you can take before you die.
- Armour reduces incoming damage.
- Shield self-regenerates over time.
Basically, armour and shield are similar to life, in that they contribute to your overall health, but they come with special attributes. A hero can have a mix of life, armour and shield that makes up their total health pool.
Shield will deplete before armour or life does, and armour will be damaged before life is.
Armour
Reduces incoming damage by 5 if the hit was 10 damage or more. If the damage is less than 10 then it is halved.
If a hero has innate armour, such as D.Va, then they will regain it through normal sources of healing (health packs, Mercy, etc). However, other sources of armour such as Torbjörn's armour pack are temporary bonuses and will be depleted from the hero once they run out and you will have to pick up another one.
For example:
- Winston has 400 life and 100 armour for a total of 500 HP.
- Soldier: 76 shoots a bullet that should deal 15 damage.
- The bullet hits Winston but because he has armour it only deals 10 damage.
- Winston has 400 life and 90 armour remaining.
Tracer shoots very quickly but each bullet doesn't hit hard. If her bullet does 4 damage, then armour will reduce it to 2 damage (halved).
Armour is more effective against smaller firearms such as Tracer and less effective against heavy-hitters such as Pharah and Junkrat.
Heroes such as D.Va have lots of innate armour (400 life and 200 armour).
Shield
Does not reduce incoming damage.
After three seconds of not taking damage, shield will regenerate at a rate of 25/sec.
Heroes such as Zenyatta have innate shield (50 life + 150 shield). Normal sources of healing will restore both the hero's life and shield.
Other abilities such as Zarya's Projected Barrier, Reinhardt's Shield or Winston's Barrier Projector are not shields in this sense. Instead, they are referred to as barriers and usually have their own health pool that is separate from the hero.
According to Jeff Kaplan,
We match based on skill, ping and group size.
So, level shouldn't matter. To further break down what each of those categories are, this post here describes what the matchmaking system looks for when trying to balance teams.
"Skill" in this context refers to two things: your win rate and your MMR. Your win rate is calculated by taking the number of games you've won and dividing that by the total number of games you've played. Your MMR is an invisible number that goes up when you win and down when you lose and is supposed to represent how good you are at the game. Your MMR has to start somewhere, and while your account is new it will fluctuate wildly with each game played as the system is trying to figure out what number best represents your skill based on your average. As you continue to play games, the system becomes more confident in your MMR and the fluctuating decreases. A good matchmaking system will pair up players with similar confident MMR scores, in theory creating even games every time.
"Ping" is a number, measured in milliseconds (0.001 of a second), that
represents how long it takes your console to send information to the
host or server and receive a response back from the server. High ping
is a direct cause of things such as shots not registering, people
teleporting around, getting kills by shooting thin air, and other
issues that people generally associate with lag. Thus, a low-ping
environment is preferable.
"Group size", in theory, should refer to pairing up premade teams of
similar size against each other, mitigating the inherent advantage of
premades (communication, consistent roles, confidence in the skill of
your teammates, etc.) by giving that advantage to both teams. Bigger
premade should = bigger advantage, thus the need for groups of similar
size on each team.
Though, it should be noted, the longer you are searching for matches, the looser the constraints will become in attempt to get you into a game.
Best Answer
Weapon Accuracy: Out of all of the shots you fired, how many you hit. For example: out of 100 Shots fired, 50 shots hit, so you have 50% Weapon Accuracy.
Critical Hit Accuracy: Out of all the shots you hit, how many were critical (headshots). For example, out of 200 shots fired, 100 shots hit, but 20 were criticals, so you have 20% Critical Hit Accuracy.
And going a step further, Widowmaker has a special stat called Scoped Critical Accuracy, which is the accuracy for criticals dealt while scoped (so the SMG shots don't count)