How much Armor actually protects - a Numa Prime Study!

[WhoIsThis]

You also have to consider the speed of the attacks, some are fast, and some are slow. I know on some maps you can without a doubt tell the difference between having protection buff and not, and others you cannot. The "dogs" on the last map also seem to hit harder than the ones on OL. On outer limits you do not really need the armor, but on the last two maps you do.

This is why I use damage implant + fast weapon on Outer Limits, and Rilfe + armor implant on Uncharted Ruins.

In theory, we would expect armor to be much more useful against fast rate of fire, high DPS, but low damage per hit attacks versus attacks that have lower DPS, are slower, but hit harder per shot.

Bosses in particular seem to have very high armor. There have been serious arguments in favor of carrying 2 weapons for all classes, the class specific ones against mobs (for higher DPS in the case of engineers and operatives; AOE for commandos), and a rifle for bosses.

Baddies also have stats, so the relative values of their weapons, str/dex/int, etc should factor in, right? That would explain why OL > CyCorp, etc.

There's little reason to believe that the enemy armor will work any differently. This does have implications. The damage buff and critical hit buff in the operative skill amplify pain for example, are thus more valuable than the actual armor debuff.