Bullet & Spirit resist (armor)
Match your armor to the colour hurting you — orange numbers mean buy Bullet Armor, purple means Spirit Armor — because the right resist saves more fights than another gun item.
Bullet Resist and Spirit Resist are percentage cuts to incoming damage: Bullet Resist softens guns and melee, Spirit Resist softens abilities. Each is its own pool, and picking the one that matches what's actually killing you is one of the biggest survivability swings in the game.
Percent reduction, stacked multiplicatively
Every resist is a flat percentage off one type of incoming damage. Bullet Resist reduces all weapon and melee damage; Spirit Resist reduces all ability (spirit) damage. The two are separate pools — Bullet Armor does nothing against a spirit nuke, and vice versa. The damage numbers tell you which to buy: orange numbers are bullet, purple numbers are spirit.
Resist sources do NOT simply add up. They stack multiplicatively, each one chipping the remaining damage. A hero carrying +45% from one source, +15% from another and +12% from a third ends up at 1 − (0.55 × 0.85 × 0.88) ≈ 58.9% total, not 72%. That's why the displayed number climbs slower the more armor you own.
Most heroes start at 0% in both, but a few have innate resist baked in: Lash and Skyrunner begin with +10% Spirit Resist, while Pocket and Trapper sit at −15% Spirit Resist and take extra ability damage until items fix it. Item face values to anchor on (all Vitality): Bullet Armor and Battle Vest give +18% bullet (Tier 2, 1600 souls), Spirit Armor gives +15% spirit (Tier 2, 1600), and the Tier 3 Resilience items give +30% with a further +15% while you're below 50% HP (3200 souls).
Shred, negative resist and hard walls
Resist reduction — shred — is the answer to armor stacking. It's subtracted from the target's raw resist FIRST, before the multiplicative math runs: Bullet Resist Shredder knocks −10% Bullet Resist off whoever you hit (1600), Mystic Vulnerability strips −8% Spirit Resist (1600). Because it lowers the underlying number, shred can push a target into NEGATIVE resist, where they take bonus damage — a target at −20% resist eats +20% extra damage of that type.
That makes shred strongest against exactly the tanky targets who stacked the most armor. As of the 05-22-2026 patch, total damage-reduction debuffs (Inhibitor, Fire Scarabs and similar) now stack diminishingly instead of adding, so you can't infinitely chain them to delete everyone's resist.
The opposite extreme is a hard wall rather than a percentage: Metal Skin's active makes you take zero bullet and melee damage for 5 seconds, and Plated Armor (Tier 4) adds 130 HP and cuts the single biggest bullet hit you take by 50%. Return Fire even hands out 10% bullet resist while bouncing 65% of bullet damage back at the shooter.
How to play it
Itemise reactively. Read the colour of the damage chewing through you and buy the matching armor — picking the wrong resist is a wasted slot, so respond to the threat that's actually killing you, not to your lane assignment. A 1600-soul Tier 2 armor dropped early against a bursty lane bully is one of the best-value buys in the game.
Don't fear the 'diminishing' display. Because stacking is multiplicative, every armor item multiplies your effective HP against that type by roughly its face value no matter how much you already own — a +18% item always turns into about +22% bullet-EHP. The real trap is over-stacking ONE type while a second damage source ignores it entirely.
Resist multiplies with raw health, so the tankiest builds buy both: 130 HP plus 30% resist gives far more survivability than either alone. Save the Tier 3 Resilience items for brawlers who fight at low HP and want that below-50% bonus, and when an enemy carry out-stacks your armor, answer with a cheap shredder instead of trying to out-tank them.
1 − (1−r₁)(1−r₂)… − shred
Update history61
- Guardians scaling resistance from +75%->-50% over 12 minutes to +50%->-50% (takes more damage early)
- Bullet Velocity now stacks additively rather than diminishingly
- Shrine Bullet Resistance increased from 10% to 20%
- Spirit Investment Bonus now has a 6.4k line, changed from 4.8k/7.2k/9.6k/16k to 4.8k/6.4k/8k/11.2k/16k with bonuses from 38/48/57/66 to 38/45/52/59/66
- Walkers Bullet Resistance increased from 15% to 25%
- Rounds: Weapon Damage reduced from +45% to +30%
- Rounds: Spirit Power reduced from +10 to +7
- Shot: Weapon Damage per stack reduced from 10% to 8%
- Magazine: Weapon Damage increased from 12% to 14%
- Shot: Secondary Fire Weapon Damage increased from 35% + 1%/boon to 40% + 1.3%/boon
- Fire: Bullet damage returned increased from 50% to 60%
- Spirit
- Doorman: Luggage Cart T2 now deals 75 bonus damage (0.6 spirit scaling) when hitting a wall
- Geist: Life Drain spirit scaling reduced from 0.536 to 0.43
- Geist: Life Drain T3 spirit scaling increased from +0.3 to +0.4
- Spirit investment rescaled from 7/11/15/19/38/52/64/76/89/101 to 7/11/15/19/38/48/57/66/75/100
- Small neutrals spirit resist increased from 35% to 45%
- Spirit
- Shots: Debuff Resist increased from 18% to 20%
- Magazine: Weapon Damage increased from +6% to +8%
- Rounds: Now grants +8% Weapon Damage
- Rounds: Bullet Velocity increased from +50% to +60% (these changes affect upgrades)
- Rounds: Spirit Power increased from +8 to +10
Raw dataidentity & API
identity
- id
- mechanic_damage_and_resists
- slug
- damage-and-resists
- category
- combat
- flowStage
- fighting
- aliases
- bullet resist, spirit resist, tech resist, armor, resistances, damage reduction, EHP, effective HP, resist shred, armor pen, armor reduction, защита от пуль, защита от духа, сопротивления, броня
- sourcePath
- manual:mechanics/damage-and-resists
- updatedAt
- 2026-06-06T00:00:00.000Z