Talk:Armor/@comment-3516765-20110405090323/@comment-67.172.84.41-20110603035535

"Effective health" means that if you were to take damage of that type and take no resistances into account, that's how much damage it would take to kill you. If Ashe crits you for 400 but you have 75% damage resistance, then you take 100 damage. So you see a "100" on the screen. The other way to think of it is as if you had 4x as much health; you can pretend that you still took 400 damage, but your "effective health" is, say, 8000 instead of raw health of 2000. So you take 400 damage out of an "effective health" of 8000, or 100 damage out of a raw health pool of 2000.

Now if Soraka heals you for 400 raw/actual health, that's like being healed for 1600 effective health. So resists really pay off, making HP5 synergize a *lot* with resistances. Base health synergizes with resistances, too, since effective health = (1+Armor/100)*(base health)

That's if there's only AD in the game... if there's magic, then your MRes has to be equal to your armor for this to remain valid. Finally, you can think of True Damage (like Cho eating you and silver bolts) as having an "effective health" multiplier, if you like.