This guide will go over armor stats and their importance, and touch on a few of the exotics that are considered meta at the time of writing.

ARMOR STATS

There are six major armor stats that players need to manage: Mobility, Resilience, Recovery, Discipline, Intellect, and Strength. These stats determine everything from a character’s strafe speed to the recharge rate of their skills.

A full set of armor is comprised of five pieces. With the exception of the class item which has zero stats, all pieces of legendary armor have stats totaling anywhere between 44 and 68 points. What separates a desirable piece from an undesirable piece is how these points are distributed.

For example, if your goal is to create a 100-stat build, you will first need to identify what stat you want to focus on. For PvE, Resilience is universally known as the first stat any player should focus on because at 100 Resilience, the player will receive a 40% damage reduction from AI enemies! In raids, your survivability could mean the difference between the team finishing the encounter or the team wiping, which is why Resilience is often the stat that most players focus on first.

“Resilience is universally known as the first stat any PvE player should focus on because at 100 Resilience, the player will receive a 40% damage reduction from AI enemies!“

– ZerOxShadows

Crucially, this damage resistance effect does not scale linearly, and is heavily weighted towards the top of the curve, as shown in the table below:

In other words, you would be selling yourself short to make a large investment of 70 points for a 20% damage reduction, when an additional 30 points would grant you the maximum 40% damage reduction – which makes a noticeable difference in end-game content such as raids or grandmaster nightfalls.

Stat distribution on armor pieces becomes even more crucial when players have more ambitious goals of creating a double- or even triple-100 stat build. The example below shows that players must be extremely mindful of how the stats are distributed, even amongst high stat armor, as it could mean the difference between being on the cusp of your goal and achieving it:

Luckily, players can receive a helpful boost to their stats by applying General Armor Mods. With these mods, you can choose to apply an additional 5 or 10 points to the stat of your choice at the cost of armor energy. These are generally slotted across all five armor pieces, and is an easy way to receive an additional 50 points on top of the armor’s base stat.

Another quick and simple way to increase your armor stats is to simply choose subclass Fragments that add an additional 10 points to the stat of your choosing. This, however, is not the recommended way of building towards your stat goal as Fragments should be used for how they factor into your player-build, and not solely for the additional armor stats.

Perhaps the best way in obtaining stat specific gear is understanding the Armorer Economic Ghost Mod on your Ghost Shell, and how this factors into your loot drops. The Armorer Economic Ghost Mod forces armor pieces with random stats to drop a guaranteed minimum of 10 points in the stat of your choosing, and are more likely to drop with higher numbers in that particular stat. For example, if you are looking to build a 100 Resilience set, you would want to select the Resilience Armorer mod and all your armor will drop with a minimum of 10 points in Resilience – conveniently allowing you to gather armor pieces for a 100 Resilience build rather quickly just from playing the game and collecting loot.

For players who wish to have a double- or triple-100 build, however, there is a bit more nuance to this. As mentioned at the beginning of this guide, stats are comprised of six attributes. If you were to divide the stats into two halves, you would have Mobility, Resilience, and Recovery in one bucket, and Discipline, Intellect, and Strength in the other. For legendary armor, all loot drops have one large “spike” in the stats, and two smaller stat spikes. The two smaller spikes will always be in the opposite bucket as the large spike, and the large spike will always be random. That is however, until you equip an Armorer Economic Ghost Mod. The large spike will now be guaranteed on the stat you have targeted. What remains random is which two of the three stats in the opposite bucket will receive the smaller spikes.

For example, the goal for my Hunter was to build a triple-100 stat armor set, with 100 points in Mobility, Resilience, and Discipline, respectively. The Economic Ghost Mod I choose is the Discipline Armorer because not only do I want high discipline, I also want spikes in two of the three stats in the top bucket. You’ll see in the image below how the two buckets are divided, with the blue arrow representing the Discipline Armorer applied Economic Ghost Mod:

Now, drops are guaranteed to have high Discipline and have a better chance of landing spikes in Mobility and Resilience. There are other factors to consider, such as the total number of stats and the number of residual points that fall into the other two stats grouped in the bucket of the large spike, but it is a much more effective way to land desirable gear rather than leaving it all completely to chance without an Armorer mod.

As of this writing, Resilience is generally considered to be the highest priority stat, followed by Discipline. The third stat is not so black and white as this stat would be dependent on player-build/playstyle and may not even be necessary.

The best place to receive high-stat armor are in dungeons (such as the Pit of Heresy boss), spending Umbral Energy at the H.E.L.M. (with the proper seasonal tokens invested for high-stat drops), and raids. The Solstice armor is also a fantastic way to earn high-stat armor, if you can complete the goals to enhance the armor.

EXOTIC ARMOR

Comparatively, this section will be much shorter than the Armor Stats section as the meta changes rapidly and what is a staple exotic today may collect dust in the vault in the near future. I would also caution that the builds listed below are only suggestions and should be used as a base before being tailored to the individual’s playstyle. Players should ideally identify their strengths and choose armor mods that complement their playstyles around the meta builds. There is still more potential to be utilized and room for different mods to be introduced, instead of reproducing cookie cutter player-builds.

Below are the current meta exotics and the associated video showcasing the build:

Hunter

• Assassin’s Cowl
• Liar’s Handshake
• Omnioculus
• Gyrfalcon’s Hauberk
• Liar’s Handshake

Titan

• Heart of Inmost Light (Arc)
• Heart of Inmost Light (Void)
• Loreley Splendor

Warlock

• Starfire Protocol
• Phoenix Protocol
• Fallen Sunstar
• Osteomancy Gloves