to properly understand how armor interacts with you, you'd need to understand what the swat are doing to you and how your armor interacts with the damage that you take.

throughout this whole guide, i will be talking in the context of the OVERKILL difficulty and using their damage values when talking about how much damage your plates can take.

the amount of damage Overkill swat can deal at point blank without any damage resistance negating damage, they're subjected to damage fall off based on how far you are from the swat unit.





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and here's the amount of damage they deal with only native damage resistance from your plates:








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now we know how much the average unit you'd be coming across can deal, you now need to know that a single plate has 65 HP no matter what type of plate you select, i will state how much "Effective HP" a plate has, which is basically how much damage the plate actually needs to take before breaking if the DR was just added HP to the plate (e.g 25% of 65 HP will be 81.25 effective HP), now, lets see what the 3 armor types do by themselves (aka 1 plate)

Starting off with:

whilst impact plates are basically Payday 2's armor as they can fully regenerate no matter how damaged it is, the downside to the armor type is that it takes 3 seconds to regenerate, taking a single down away, having no native damage resistance (now going by DR to condense the paragraphs) and and be able to use the "Head Guard Skill in the juggernaut tree

Due to impact plates having no native DR, they are very fragile with them getting shredded by dozers and shotgun swats, whilst it not being able to handle much gun fire from assault rifle and SMG swats, some skills can help with getting DR, but due to the lack of DR skills in 2.0, you can't really rely on them to tank damage besides the minigun's Overskill DR reaching up to 90%

Adaptive Plates are a mix of Resistant plates and Impact plates, as they can regen the whole plate just as long it doesn't break or else you'd need a armor bag to replace the plate.

With them having 25% DR and having an effective HP of 81.25, with a 1.5 second regen time and them taking away 1 down, they can take more damage and since they're not impact plates, you'll need to be careful on not getting it destroyed as they can be just as fragile as impact plates if you're playing too aggressive or just standing out in the open.


With Resistant Plates being the most tanky plate in the bunch, with 40% DR with an effective HP of 91 and with a regen time of 1.2 second, but the downside of resistant plates as everyone that was around during launch knows, is that they take trauma damage, so they'll break at some point.

now that we know what plate does what, it's important for you to know how the armor frame system works.

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each frame has a base amount of downs of 4, and only adaptive and impact can remove a single down per plate

and each frame has a certain amount of ammo that it can hold which are:





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each frame also can reduce how much consumables you can pocket which are:

4 Consumables

3 Consumables

2 Consumables

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Frames can also affect how fast you can move around the heist
for this i'm using https://pd3.gg/planner for my source for the movement speeds which are

(With Skills 2.0 being out, they might have affected this, but due to the lack of info about what changed numbers wise, i can't really do much about it, so i'm leaving this here for the possibility that they didn't change them, BUT BE WARNED THAT THESE NUMBERS AREN'T CERTAIN!)

Whilst masked:

Walking: 3.5 m/s
Sprinting: 6.5 m/s
Crouching: 2.3 m/s
aiming+standing: 3 m/s

Whilst unmasked:

Walking: 3 m/s
Sprinting: 6 m/s
Crouching: 2.53 m/s

Whilst masked:

Walking: 3.25 m/s
Sprinting: 6 m/s
Crouching: 2.15 m/s
aiming+standing: 2.75 m/s

Whilst unmasked:

Walking: 2.75 m/s
Sprinting: 5.5 m/s
Crouching: 2.25 m/s

Whilst masked:

Walking: 3 m/s
Sprinting: 5.5 m/s
Crouching: 2 m/s
aiming+standing: 2.5 m/s

Whilst unmasked:

Walking: 2.5 m/s
Sprinting: 5 m/s
Crouching: 2 m/s

Whilst masked:

Walking: 2.75 m/s
Sprinting: 5 m/s
Crouching: 1.85 m/s
aiming+standing: 2.25 m/s

Whilst unmasked:

Walking: 2.25 m/s
Sprinting: 4.5 m/s
Crouching:1.85 m/s

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the last plate in your frame (gonna be using plate number 4 from the mercenary frame example) will be the first one to be damaged.

so in the menu's the 4th plate would be the first to be damaged, and the last plate that would be damaged is the 1st one, so take that into consideration when making your frame.

and just to note the information i'm gonna tell you is told to you by the game itself when looking to the right of your character in the armor selection screen (image shown as example), so refer to that information if you're mix and matching your plates.
(Note: the stats you see in the image were from Skills 1.0, so they're not the actual stats currently in the game)

now we understand how the base stats are for the frames, lets see how your armor works with them

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MedTech doesn't really provide much for your armor, but it's great for HP or medic builds with it's passive of giving you 40 more HP per first aid kit.

Not much to say about it, just refer to the Armour type Chapter to know how your armor interacts with the MedTech Frame.

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a pretty good frame for builds that use tools quite a bit and is also using bounty hunter for either stealth builds using ECM's, Trip lasers, motion sensors, etc or loud builds that are using trip lasers, infrasonic mines, etc.

and since you have to have 2 plates in it, i'll tell you how each plate interacts with the same plate type stacked (e.g 2 impact plates, 2 adaptive plates, 2 resistant plates)

with 2 impact plates, they will have an total HP of 130 (same with every plate type as a reminder) with a regen time of 6 Seconds and removing 2 downs.

with 2 adaptive plates, they'll have an effective HP of 162.5 and a regen time of 3 seconds and removing 2 downs.

with 2 resistant plates, they'll have an effective HP of 182 and a regen time of 2.4 seconds and not removing a single down.

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i guess it can be a good frame if you don't wanna invest points into throwable skills, be good to always be sure you'd have a throwable in your back pocket for when you need it.

for how stacking plates interact with the frame:

3 Impact Plates have a total HP of 195 with a regen time of 9 seconds and takes away 3 downs.

3 Adaptive Plates have an effective HP of 243.75 with a regen time of 4.5 seconds and removing 3 downs.

3 Resistant Plates have an effective HP of 273 with a regen time of 3.6 seconds and not removing a down.

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with skills 2.0 changing the passive to 2 seconds of god mode per plate breaking (and somehow on every single frame), it's not as good as it used to, and also pretty much sent resistant plates back to how they were at launch, which i believe wasn't the right choice, but what do i know, i'm a nerd saying numbers to you, at least they kept the additional passive of being able to give you 3 seconds of invulnerability apon usage of an Armor repair kit.

anyways, here's how stacking plates would go with the frame:

4 Impact Plates have a total HP of 260 with a regen time of 12 seconds with it removing 4 downs, technically leaving you with 0 downs but due to SBZ foreseeing that would be bad, they would give you 1 down when ever you go below 1.

4 Adaptive Plates have an effective HP of 325 with a regen time of 6 seconds and taking 4 downs (but defaults to 1 down).

4 Resistant Plates have an effective HP of 364 with a regen time of 4.8 seconds and taking no downs

In general, you should be putting Impact plates infront of Resistant or Adaptive plates to act as a buffer so your Resistant plates for example won't be taking chip damage from some random swat from the distance same goes for adaptive plates, but you can also put adaptive plates infront of Resistant plates to also act as a buffer for your resistant plates, but it won't be as disposable as impact plates


so basically, your frames should always (in my personal opinion) be like this:

(R = Resistant)
(A = Adaptive)
(I = Impact)

R/R/R/I
R/R/A/I
R/A/A/I
R/A/I/I
R/A/I
R/A
R/I
A/I

and so on.

WIth skills 2.0 reworking the entirety of the skill system, not a lot of changes had happen to armor (who could've guest), but, all of them we're undocumented in the patch notes, and even worse, changing the base HP of a plate down to 65 HP from 75 HP without us being able to tell what the plate HP was in the first place is quite annoying and feels like we aren't getting all the info we need for how we should make our builds, so i'll go down a list of all the changes that affected armor

-impact plates

they were mostly left alone, but they did get hit the plate HP nerf so, as far as i know, they just got a slap on the wrist for no reason

- adaptive plates

there's almost no point of running adaptive plates, with no plate up, and head guard not doing a whole lot to help with regen time, adaptive pretty much died with skills 2.0, which is sad, cuz it really good for aggressive playstyles, which also got hit hard with this update, but that's besides the point of this

but they mostly just had their DR reduced to 25% from 30% for some ♥♥♥♥♥♥ reason, along side getting the 65 plate HP nerf

- resistant plates

oh how the mighty has fallen, the one plate that got hit the hardest, removing a whole 20% of DR to reduce it down to 40% (from 60%) getting an additional 0.2 seconds on regen, so it regens in 1.2 seconds instead of a single second, the mercenary frame getting it's passive removed and also getting hit with said plate HP nerf

it still finds a niche as it's DR is still good-ish, but it's pretty much a slightly worst adaptive plate now

all these changes make me feel like they want to incentivise only using impact plates, which isn't how armor 2.0 was designed, as armor 2.0 encouraged variety and experimentation, but with skills 2.0 not benefiting these 2 other plate types, they're just getting left in the dust and be remenants of a bygone era of Payday 3 where experimentation and having such open ended builds were encouraged

but that's my mini rant over anyways

EDIT: also i just noticed something that PDLucky (goat) said in his "This Was PAYDAY 3's Last Chance" video, is that the mercenary's 2 second invulnerability is actually on ALL FRAMES!

So not only that 1 impact plate got a slap on the wrist with 10 less HP, BUT IT GOTTEN EVEN MORE BROKEN WITH THAT 2 SECOND INVULNERABILITY!!!

and that when dodging, it DOESN'T COUNT AS SUPPRESSION, so it won't restart the plates regen time!

just as i thought this update gotten as bad as it did, it got even worst!

Since this is my first ever guide, please give me feedback on any kind of information i should change/add or things i need to change with the formatting (as i feel it might be hard to read but idrk lol).

i hope this guide is helpful and provide a good enough information so i'll hopefully stop seeing people have impact plates at the back of their armor frames.