In a revisiting of my very first blog entry, today's post involves an updated look at Ablative Armor. D.Va has since seen a pretty drastic fall in her popularity, making this is more of a celebratory post than a currently relevant one.

The spreadsheet can be found here.

Mechanical Explanation

Let’s start with the explanation of Ablative Armor. Ablative Armor is a level 13 talent for D.Va that reads “Damage against D.Va's mech that would deal 4% or less of your max health is reduced by 50%”. D.Va has 2000 base health in mech form, so any damage source that deals less than 80 damage is reduced by 50%. However, when verifying this in the game files I found that this threshold was not updated for D.Va’s base HP nerf from 2000 to 2060, which should have reduced the threshold from 82.4 to 80. Fixing this bug would be roughly a one-level nerf to Ablative Armor's threshold.

Ablative Armor synergizes heavily with D.Va’s Defense Matrix since almost every single attack in the game is reduced below the threshold. Ablative Armor could also effectively read, “The damage reduction from Defense Matrix is increased from 75% to 87.5%.” Similarly, outside sources of armor stacking or reduction can improve or decrease the effectiveness of Ablative Armor by first reducing or increasing the incoming damage.

Ablative Armor shouldn't work against percent damage, according to this Blue post. But as of the Kel’thuzad patch, Ablative Armor continues to mitigate percent damage.

Competing against Ablative Armor is Expensive Plating, which increases D.Va’s mech max HP by 20% and increases the cooldown on Call Mech by 15 seconds—a 33% increase from 45 seconds to 60 seconds. This represents 400 base HP. Alternatively, D.Va can pick Emergency Shielding, which negates any damage that would destroy her mech once every 15 seconds. Additionally, D.Va gains a 209.5 point shield for 6 seconds when Emergency Shielding activates. This shield is equal to 10.475% of D.Va’s max HP.

In regard to scaling, all of these values scale at 4% per level. However, not everything in the game scales at 4%. Values that are below the Ablative Armor threshold at level 1 may rise above the threshold by level 13 or by level 20 and vice-versa depending on whether the scaling is above or below 4%.

The final complicating factor with Ablative Armor is that the threshold scales with D.Va’s level, but incoming damage scales with the enemy team’s level. Thus, which damage gets mitigated changes based on the relative levels of each hero.

Comparing the Talents

The standards for evaluating D.Va’s level 13 talents are relatively simple. All three talents are intended to extend D.Va’s lifespan while in mech form. Expensive Plating provides the most obvious boost at a straight +20% max HP per mech life but carries the disadvantage of adding 15 seconds to her mech calldown.

For ease of rounding, I will value the damage prevention portion of Emergency Shielding at ~90.5 damage, which rounds the value of Emergency Shielding to 15% of her max HP every 15 seconds. The damage prevention may provide more or less value depending on the strength of the “finishing blow” (e.g. preventing a Pyroblast is a ton of value while Lunara's poison is worth very little).

Thus, Ablative Armor needs to provide mitigation equal to at least 15% of D.Va’s max HP to provide equivalent value. Determining the amount of effective mitigation Ablative Armor will actually provide in total is difficult since the presence of the talent can change play patterns. For instance, Nazeebo players might save their jar of spiders for a better target.

This is also complicated because Ablative Armor, like regular armor, has a healing multiplier effect by making each point of healing “go farther”. However, if we are assuming no incoming heals, then at least 30% of the enemy team’s damage output must be affected by Ablative Armor.

Ablative Armor Tier List

Characters are rated both by how much overall damage they do and what percentage of their damage is mitigated by Ablative Armor. The higher the tier, the greater the returns from Ablative Armor. For example, almost all of Nazeebo's damage is mitigated by Ablative Armor, but not a single ability from Alarak is mitigated by the talent.

This tiering is not just a measure of mitigated damage but also a measure of the team’s overall damage that hero will contribute and how likely it is that that damage will be directed at D.Va. Supports like Lucio who have very low damage that is mitigated almost entirely by Ablative Armor are significantly lower in tier.

Tier F is reserved for heroes who have none or only inconsequential amounts of their damage mitigated by Ablative Armor.