How Does Armor Work Payday 3. All Hidden Mechanics Explained

Intro

You don't know how armor works, and that's okay. Payday 3 doesn't tell you anything about it. Everything you're about to see in this article here was kind of just figured out, so it's not your fault; it's their fault. We're going to be short and sweet with this one. This is everything about how armor works in Payday 3.

Fundamentals

all right So the first thing I want to go over is how armor fundamentally works; it's a little different than it was in Payday 2 and Payday the Heist. So when you are shot in Payday 3, you lose about 10% of your armor permanently. It turns red; you have probably seen it before. The rest of that damage is turned into flashing armor and it's not actually gone yet you can regenerate it by waiting and just not getting shot so usually if you get shot by an enemy you take cover or kill everybody around you then you can wait and it'll regen that white armor, or if you have flashing white armor and you take a hit off of an armor bag it restores the flashing chunk plus an additional chunk for the armor bag that you hit, now once a plate is gone you actually can't regenerate it so you have to replenish it from an armor bag if you're using a three plate vest and you've only got two plates left you can't get that third plate back until you hit an armor bag it's just gone, now when you're out of Armor All of the damage you take actually goes directly into your health bar, which doesn't last nearly as long in most cases.

Playstyles

They're worth the same amount; it's just scaled down, so because of all of this, taking all of this into account, we want to consider armor to have two different play styles. The first style is going to be to absorb all damage. You're going to want to take the biggest vest. You can probably take an armor bag.

Regeneration really doesn't matter on this build. You just want to hide and slowly kill your enemies before they kill you. This is probably the style that most people have adapted to in Payday 3, where you don't think as much about regeneration and just eat plates as you need them and kind of push the objectives without really worrying too much about your armor.

You still try to kill enemies before they can deal too much damage to your armor, but it's less of a factor, and you don't even try to regenerate at all. The second-place style is going to be mitigating damage through regeneration. So usually you want to take a smaller vest, so I usually recommend two plates or less, and then your objective is to hide after being shot so that you regenerate your armor.

One more thing about how armor works is that it actually affects the number of downs you get in the game, so if you take the four-plate vest, you only get two downs, whereas the one-plate vest gives you four downs, and the medium ones, two and three, give you three downs, so when you're making your builds, you can weigh this in.

Skills for armor

Let's go over some of the skills that affect armor played up is a skill that a lot of people are recommending right now as long as you have grit you'll regenerate your armor chunk immediately, you pick up ammo now this is really good to a lot of people because they're taking the four plate vest which has that slow regen and we'll talk about that again a little bit later we're talking about regen speed right after this by the way I wanted to knock skills out first because there are some skills that affect regen speed so I'd rather you know the skills before we talk about the actual timing for every armor piece, tank is the really important one for armor so it increases the Regeneration speed of your armor chunks by 20%.

about

You're probably not going to notice this as much on a four-plate armor vest because it's so long that even though it knocks off a couple seconds, it's still so long you're barely going to regenerate anything. With the one- and two-plate vests, this is going to make a bigger difference, so keep that in mind.

We have Hardy, which, as long as you have an armor chunk, you're 50% less affected by stagger stun and all that. All those effects that can be really annoying—this is a good one to take to try to mitigate them because you're almost always going to have armor on most builds. I'll mention it quickly.

Extra plates give you two more armor bag charges. Just because this is an armor article we'll talk about the fact that the armor bag gives you armor bag it doesn't do anything besides that so if you're not taking an armor bag Deployable, there you go it's not that important and the last one we have here is armor up, which if you take a plate of armor from an armor bag you actually get two plates for the price of one this is something that everybody's recommending, right now, it's not super necessary once you learn how to use a one and two plate vest because you're using armor regen instead of just eating more armor, so consider taking this on builds where you take the four plate vest but not when you're using the one or two plate vest obviously not the one plate vest because you're it's just a wasted skill point at that point but two or three you can use it but consider not taking it to save a point.

Regeneration speeds

Okay, this is the most important part about armor. Honestly, it probably should be at the beginning, but I wanted to talk about how armor worked fundamentally before we got into the more nitty-gritty stuff about it, so we're going to talk about armor regeneration, speed, and plate count. I've got a demonstration here that I'm going to show you.