Armour in CS:GO is stupidly difficult to explain and it makes no real-world sense, but seems
to work okay for Counter-Strike’s gameplay, and is super-important to have almost every
round, so listen up! The first reason for buying armour is to eliminate
AIM PUNCH. When you get shot in the body or head (though strangely, not the arms), your
vision shakes about and your aim gets worse. Buying a vest protects against body shots,
and a helmet protects against headshots, eradicating the problem of aimpunch. So that’s one reason
for buying armour. There, with that out of the way, it’s onto
how armour protects you against damage for the rest of the video. And I’ll warn you
now: if you think you understand it, you don’t.
If you buy armour in CS:GO, it will absorb up to 200 points of damage before it’s destroyed.
Although it’s shown on-screen out of 100, that’s more like a percentage of however
much is left of its 200 hit points.
If you buy a vest, it covers your lower body, your upper body AND your arms. And hands.
And groin. A helmet covers your entire face. So with
a helmet+vest combo it will protect your entire body, apart from your legs.
It doesn’t matter if you buy just a vest, or a vest and helmet: they’ll still only
protect you from 200 points of damage before they BOTH disappear. It doesn’t matter where
the armour is hit- if the vest takes 200 points of damage, the helmet will still disappear.
And if the helmet takes 200 points of damage, the vest will disappear. They’re treated
as a single ‘thing’ by the game, which is probably why, once you have both, you can’t
rebuy one separately from the other.
Also, armour absorbs only a fraction of the damage dealt to you. Here’s a list of all
of the weapons, in order of armour penetration. Not that any gun in CS:GO does, but IF a gun
had 0% armour penetration, if it hit your armour then you wouldn’t take damage from
it until ALL of your armour had been used up. But no gun in CS:GO is as low as 0% armour
penetration. The lowest is the glock, and even that gun is rated at 47% armour penetration,
meaning that for every 100 points of damage dealt to you, 53 of those points will be absorbed
by the armour. For simplicity’s sake, let’s imagine a
gun had 50% armour penetration, like the nova or the CT starting pistols.Ish. Whatever damage
it deals to you will be split 50-50 between your health, and your armour. So say a bullet
does 60 damage, it would deduct 30 from your health, and 30 from your armour, leaving you
at 70 health… and 85 armour, because remember it’s made up of 200 hit points, so 30 damage
is only 15% of its total. The SG553 is the only gun in the game with
100% armour penetration, so if you know you’ll be fighting against people armed with this
gun, you might as well not even buy armour because it won’t help you at all. Apart
from by stopping aim punch. The bullet’s damage will all be inflicted
to your health, and rather confusingly, your armour will remain at 100%, no matter how
many times it’s shot through by the SG553. But that’s just with the SG553, which is
a silly weapon. All other weapons in the game will have their damage at least partially
stopped by armour. The AWP’s armour penetration is second-highest at 97.5%, so wearing armour
will only save you from a few points of damage with this gun. It’s not really worth buying
if you know you’ll be fighting enemies equipped with AWPs. But others, like the starting pistols,
SMGs and …nova shotgun, have much lower armour penetration values so armour will be
more effective in protecting against these. ALL rifles have at least 70% armour penetration,
which means they don’t just deal more damage than SMGs do, but less of it is stopped by
armour. I WOULD say this makes armour less important to buy when up against rifle-wielding
foes, but it’s still the difference between a 1 shot kill and a 2 shot kill, or a 2 shot
kill and a 3 shot kill. So even though it’s only absorbing a small fraction of the damage,
it’s still enough to make a life-or-death difference in battles, and therefore still
has purpose and importance. As for grenades, the figures over on the counterstrike
wiki actually proved to be correct! Molotovs and incendiary grenades will be unaffected
by armour, which is different from when I tested it back in 2014. Damage from explosive
grenades will be reduced by 40%. And grenade impact damage is halved. It might make all
the difference in the world. So that’s the basics of armour in CS:GO!
Rewatch this first bit of the video until you understand it. And don’t forget to subscribe.
When should you rebuy armour? One situation would be if you only have a vest, and want
to upgrade to a helmet. Like, say you bought a vest for the pistol round, and now want
to buy a helmet to defend against one-shot kills in the second round.
Provided your vest hasn’t been damaged, you can upgrade to a helmet for just $350.
BUT if the vest is damaged, even by as little as 1%, it’ll cost you a full $1,000 to upgrade
to a helmet and vest combo. This is why it sucks so much when you somehow
survive pistol round without taking damage, only for a teammate to jokingly celebrate
by shooting you. That’s one of the most infuriating things that can happen in the
game, especially since they think you’re overreacting when you have a go at them for
it and are all like ‘dude the round’s over’. Yeah but the game isn’t!
It's also why it’s worth landing a shot on an enemy’s body during pistol rounds,
because if they’ve already bought armour then it will prevent them from cheaply upgrading
to a helmet for the second round.
Once you’ve got a vest and helmet, you can replenish both to 100% for just $650.
A bit of a friendly reminder: a helmet may or may not be worth getting depending on your
situation. As a terrorist, buying a helmet is useful because it means the CT rifles take
2 headshots to kill instead of just one. But as a CT, I know the terrorists’ AK47 rifle
will one-hit kill me either way so I might as well save that $350 by just getting a vest,
and by using that money elsewhere instead. I have a video talking about when a helmet
is worth getting which I suggest you check out if you want to know more.
The OTHER time you should rebuy armour is if what you have is damaged enough to not
survive the upcoming round. It’s not as simple as saying that ‘as long as you have
40% of your armour left then you won’t need to rebuy’. Because that totally depends
on the weapons the enemies will be using! If you know they’re all going to be using
cheap pistols, then -in theory!- being shot by a P2000 could reduce armour by up to 50
points, and being shot by a glock, up to 56 points! But if you’re shot with an M4, it
might drop by just 22%, or by as little as 15% with the AK. But, as you’ll soon find
out, it will almost always be a bit higher than that.
Because damage rounds up for the armour, and down for your health. Which doesn’t sound
like it should make a big difference, but it can! Take a look at this. I’m being shot
by a glock, and it’s deducting 11 health and 14 armour every time, when it should really
be doing 11.75 health damage and only 13.25 armour damage. This doesn’t sound like a
large difference, but it adds up. This rounding difference gets more important,
the less damage per shot that’s being dealt. If you’re being attacked by lots of glock-wielding
enemies a long way away, it will make a MASSIVE difference to the amount of damage you’ll
sustain! Here’s an even more extreme example, where
I’m being shot by a glock at a distance of 4000 units. After 28 hits, I’m still
alive with just 4 health and 16 points of armour. I lost 84% of my armour in a single
round, thanks to the damage being rounded up every time!
And that’s why there isn’t a hard limit on how much armour could be taken off you
in a single round. You hear people recommending that you rebuy after you drop below 40 armour.
It’s advice that I typically stick to- and it’s no hardship to do that because the
chances are you’ve won several rounds in a row by that point and have a lot of money
in the bank. But there will be times when 40 armour won’t even come close to covering
you completely. All because of rounding.
And on top of all this, you’ve got to weigh up the cost of rebuying armour with whatever
else you could be spending it on. If you’ve got lots of money then sure, you might as
well rebuy it just to be safe. But if you’ve still got, say, 30 armour left, and it’s
a choice between rebuying that and being able to afford grenades, or a better weapon…
then you’ve got to decide which is more important to you. And you may only know that
with hindsight once the next round is over.
You got all that? Armour in CS:GO is not simple. I hate how armour works in most games. It
feels so… approximate. I’d much rather it saved you from a few hits fully than to
shield you by a vague percentage, which makes me view armour in a mushy half-hearted mechanic
in games such as CS:GO or Skyrim. Just give me armour that stops all damage, then makes
a sound when it breaks to indicate when it needs to be replaced. I’d appreciate it
a lot more.
You’ve reached the end of this video. And if you’re leaving this topic more confused
about armour than you were when you started... well done, you’ve been paying attention.