Armor does not have diminishing returns. Every point is exactly 1% more effective health, forever, and the percentage figure everyone quotes is what makes it look otherwise. Here's the real math and what it means for your build.
League of Legends Guide
Armor and Magic Resist
How Resistances WorkArmor reduces physical damage, magic resist reduces magic damage, and both run on identical math, so everything below is true of either one. True damage is the outlier: it's the only damage type with no stat standing in front of it.
The rest of this is one division and the several conclusions people get wrong about it.
One division does all the work
Incoming damage is divided by one plus your resistance over a hundred. At 100 armor that's a division by two, so a thousand damage becomes five hundred.
That's the only number worth memorizing, because everything else follows from it. Sources also stack additively: items, runes, buffs and your base stats pool into one total before the division happens, with no layers to sequence and nothing multiplying.
Every point is 1% more effective health
| Armor | Damage taken | 1000 health behaves like |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 100% | 1000 |
| 25 | 80% | 1250 |
| 100 | 50% | 2000 |
| 200 | 33% | 3000 |
| 300 | 25% | 4000 |
Straight line, no curve, no cap. The tenth point of armor and the two hundredth point buy you exactly the same amount of survivability.
Armor does not have diminishing returns
This is the correction that matters, because the opposite gets repeated in every lobby and has been wrong for the entire history of the game.
What fools people is the percentage. 100 armor is 50% reduction, doubling to 200 only reaches about 67%, and doubling again to 400 only reaches 80%, so written that way the returns look like they're collapsing. They aren't. The percentage is a share of a shrinking number, so of course it flattens. The thing keeping you alive is effective health, and that never flattens at all.
Stacking resistances gets better the more you have, because each point adds a fixed 1% to a pool the previous points already enlarged. The fifth defensive item is not a wasted slot.
Additive stacking is normally what causes diminishing returns in games. Here it's the exact mechanism that prevents them, which is a genuinely counterintuitive result and the reason the wrong version spreads so easily.
Health and resistances multiply each other
Because armor increases your health by a percentage, a point of armor is worth exactly as much as the health behind it, and a point of health is worth exactly as much as the armor in front of it.
That's why an item carrying both feels stronger than its stat line reads, and why a squishy champion buying pure armor gets less out of it than anybody else in the game would.
Base and bonus are two different stats
Base resistance is what your champion has from levels alone. Bonus is everything else: items, runes, abilities, buffs. A number of effects in the game scale off bonus specifically and ignore the base entirely, so two champions sitting on the same total can get very different results out of the same item.
Two champions break the pattern on purpose. Thresh is the only champion whose base armor doesn't grow with level at all, which is the balance cost of collecting it from souls instead, and Mega Gnar sits far outside every other champion's magic resist range. Both are designed weaknesses rather than oversights.
Frequently asked questions
How much damage does 100 armor block?
Half. Damage is divided by one plus armor over a hundred, so 100 armor is a division by two.
Does armor have diminishing returns?
No. Every point adds a flat 1% effective health, so stacking it gets better rather than worse.
Why does the reduction percentage flatten then?
Because a percentage of a shrinking number has to flatten. Effective health is the measure that matters and it grows linearly.
Do resistances from different sources multiply?
No, they add together into one number before the division.
Is health or armor better?
Whichever you have less of. They multiply each other, so the cheap gains are always on the side you've neglected.
The short version
One division, no curve, and no reason to stop buying resistances against a team that's actually hurting you with that damage type. Build against what's hitting you, and buy health alongside it so both numbers pull their weight.
For the other side of the same equation, our penetration guide covers how armor gets stripped back off you, and our Grievous Wounds guide covers the other stat everyone buys at the wrong time.
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