Armor Points

Double the info, double the wins.^note Left: Unreal Tournament. Right: Unreal Tournament III. From top to bottom: no armor, (Helmet+)Body Armor+Thighpads, Armor+Jump Boots, Shield Belt+Jump Boots.

In video games, usually in the HUD, this trope is a number that represents your armor's durability, i.e how much damage it can take before it breaks and stops protecting you. Can also be done with shields, whether traditional ones or force field ones. This often appears alongside the Life Meter and/or Hit Points.

Like in Hit Points's case, the armor's capability of protecting you (usually by shaving off some percentage of damage you took) is usually subject to Critical Existence Failure (meaning that it won't suffer any reduction in effectiveness even as it nearly breaks).

Regenerating Shield, Static Health is when the armor/shield can regenerate, like Regenerating Health for Hit Points, to protect your actual hitpoints which don't regenerate on their own. Anti-Armor attacks may damage this gauge more than any other attacks would (unlike Armor-Piercing Attack, which would ignore the points or only damage it lightly while dealing direct damage to your HP). Mana Shield is when your Mana Meter temporarily becomes Armor Meter as damage you take instead burns your mana.

Body Armor as Hit Points is not this trope; that is when armor directly serves as extra HP, not a Damage Reduction mechanic.

Note that a Sub-Trope of this is Single-Use Shield, where a defensive object is treated like a One-Hit-Point Wonder, but can take any amount of damage, so long as that damage is dealt as a single hit.

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Examples

First Person Shooter

• In Counter-Strike: The amount of armor the player has is a value from 0 to 100, to the right of an armor-related symbol, like a kevlar vest, or a shield. Armor is obtained by purchasing kevlar vests.
• id Software's Doom series lists both the player character's health and his armor. Doomguy's armor provides a better defense against melee attacks and projectiles when armor points are collected in the levels. There are powerups that can raise its cap, though they cannot be replenished once they're spent by taking damage, and reducing their current amount to below the original cap will also undo the extension.
• In Halo, players play as Spartans who wear armor with in-built energy shielding. The shield drains away as the player takes damage and once it's completely depleted, their HP starts taking hits.
• Hexen uses armor points internally in the same way as Doom, but only displays it as an abstract armor class (that includes the class's base AC). Hexen II has armor points tracked on a per-piece basis in the status window.
• In Outlaws, you can find boilerplates to use as armour whose durability is shown as a card on the bottom of the screen that slides down with each hit they absorb.
• In Overwatch, physical armor, (which reduces the damage of incoming fire^note specifically 3 hp for any hit that does more than 6 hp of damage, or half damage for a hit that deals less than 10 hp, meaning it can be overcome by burst damage like Junkrat or Pharah's projectiles, but works very well against rapid fire damage like Tracer and Soldier 76's guns) is represented by yellow ticks on your health bar while shield (which doesn't reduce damage, but can regenerate automatically after a few seconds of not taking damage) is represented as blue. Temporary armour and shields (which aren't healed, and sometimes drain away over time) which some abilities provide are represented by darker ticks.
• Games in the Quake series have an armor gauge of the icon+number variety for the player. This is also true for the FOSS spiritual successors, as well as game mods such as Quake Champions: Doom Edition.
  • Quake IV has a regenerating shield gauge for vehicles driven by the player and the bosses.
• Command & Conquer: Renegade used a gauge and number for both life (with a hollow gauge filling with green) and armor (with a growing row of shields and the exact armor points number on the last one).
• Unreal Tournament's and Unreal Tournament III's armor indicators are represented in the HUD (UT has it in the top-right corner, while UT3 has it in the bottom-left corner) in two ways: the icon+number variety and a human shape which not only displays the kinds of armor they have but also if the user is carrying the Jump Boots with them. In III, if the user isn't carrying any piece of armor, only the health indicator remains.
• Unreal, Unreal Championship, Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Unreal Tournament 4 display armor as an icon-number on the HUD.
  • The console versions of Unreal Tournament displays armor as a meter gauge.
  • Unreal II: The Awakening displays shields as a meter gauge.
• Armor in Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun is called contempt, which is a callback to the title of a Gaunt's Ghosts novel and a slogan of Inquisitor Ravenor's.
  "My armor is contempt. My shield is disgust. My sword is hatred."

Hack And Slash

• Diablo. When you are hit while wearing armor, there's a chance that your armor's Durability will decrease. When its Durability reaches zero, the armor is destroyed. If you take it to the blacksmith before it's destroyed, he can repair it.
• Honkai Impact 3rd: Some stronger mooks, Elite Mooks, and bosses have shield gauges that will reduce the damage taken and make them resistant to flinching until the gauge is depleted; bosses will also become stunned/dazed when it happens. The shield will eventually regenerate, so you gotta give it your all while they're still vulnerable. Some of your Valkyries' attacks may deal extra damage to the shields, while elemental attacks won't damage the shields and instead deal direct damage to the enemy.

Role Playing Game

• In Divinity: Original Sin II, each character has two armor meters: Physical and Magical, with each absorbing 1-for-1 the damage from the corresponding attack types. These meters are based on the character's equipment and don't regenerate in combat (without the use of special abilities), while running out of any type allows the character to be targeted by Status Effects (while the armor is up, only certain effects like Necrofire affect the character).
• In Dragon Age: Inquisition, characters of the warrior class get the "Guard" points, which are obtained by using certain abilities and passives and are layered on top of the regular Life Meter, absorbing the brunt of incoming damage before the warrior starts losing HP. With certain Item Crafting tricks, it is possible for rogues and mages to get Guard points, as well, giving them warrior-level defenses in addition to their own DPS, which is as broken as it sounds.

Action Adventure

• The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword's shields use a meter to indicate how much more damage they can take. The final shield doesn't take damage, but still has a meter.

Fighting Game

• BlazBlue: The Barrier Gauge determines how much the character can use the Barrier Block, i.e putting up a Deflector Shield that will negate Scratch Damage. If the gauge is depleted, they'll get a penalty where the damage they take will be increased by 1.2 times.

Real Time Strategy

• In the StarCraft series, Protoss units and buildings have a blue bar over their HP bar which indicates the current strength of their shields. Once these are depleted, damage is applied directly to their HP, and a visual effect indicates whether a unit/building has shields.
• This is a special ability of certain Imperial Guard units in Dawn of War II. You buy them extra armor, which takes damage before their HP does. This armor can't be repaired, only replaced wholesale by buying it again.
• In Stellaris armor is a stat gained by equiping ships or stations with armor plates. They give an armor score, which in turn gives an armor percentage decided by the ship size (larger ships need more armor points to gain the same armor percentage). Damage is calculated by how much it relatively would harm a ship with the same hitpoints times [1 + armor percentage]. Energy weapons and large kinetic weapons also have the ability to bypass a certain percentage of armor points, reducing their relative armor percentage.

Turn Based Strategy

• Master Of Orion II has the number of armor points (along with shield points and structure points) visible in the ship's design. In battle, they're presented as a meter adjacent to the ship in the mini display, or their exact value can be examined when scanning the ship.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown and games using that ruleset have armor points for each unit, and for each side (including underneath). It's shown on a statistics screen for said unit as a meter and number, and is based on the armor being used. Note that it is still not a complete picture, as some enemies have armor types that greatly affect the damage reduction of certain attacks. (e.g. Lobstermen multiply incoming damage from the armor piercing damage types by 0.2)

Shoot Em Up

• Alien Shooter: The game lets you acquire armors, ranging from simple kevlar vests all the way to full body armors. They also come with durability points that shows up in a gauge next to your HP bar when you equip them.

Third Person Shooter

• Gungrave: Beyond the Grave (the player character) has a blue bar beneath his HP bar that serves as this; he wouldn't actually be damaged from heavy gunfire of Mooks as long as the bar is still there, but if it depletes, that's when he takes damage normally.

Wide Open Sandbox

• In Minecraft, shields and each piece of armour have a meter that whittles down as the player takes damage while wearing them, eventually breaking when that meter runs out and leaving player more vulnerable.
• Many games from the Grand Theft Auto series have a meter to represent body armor. In Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, this was basically an extension of your life gauge. Starting in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, there were attacks which bypassed the armor and dealt damage directly to the character.

Platformers

• Spyro the Dragon: Sparx the dragonfly is Spyro's "shield", and has 4 points of armor, represented by his colors. Spyro is actually a One-Hit-Point Wonder. Sparx will take the damage for you when you get hit. Full armor is yellow, then it goes blue, then green, and the last hit makes him disappear.

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