Good day! It’s Librarian Husky. When setting up a build in Destiny, your gear stats matter a lot. In particular, the resilience stat, choosing what to run for that greatly impacts your other stats. For example, if you were to run zero resilience, you would have the minimum amount of health and you would die much easier.

On the flip side, if you run a 100 resilience, you can survive more but you have way fewer stats to distribute among the rest, like discipline for more grenades. Because of this, it’s important to find the best value for your investment, specifically in PvP and especially depending on the character you run. Today, I answer that for you.

Recent Changes in Guardian Health Values

To understand the current landscape, you need to know what has changed in Destiny. Three years ago, I determined the exact health values of Guardians in Crucible: you had 70 base health and then a shield on top of that, adding anywhere from 115 to 130 depending on your resilience stat. This meant that your guardian could have 185 health at zero resilience or up to 200 health at 100 resilience.

However, Bungie has just implemented major changes, almost like pressing a big reset button for what resilience levels will keep you alive against all the different weapons. The changes gave Guardians 30 more health; it’s not 70 HP plus shields anymore, it’s 100 HP plus shields. The new totals for your health will now be 215 at zero resilience, not 185, and 230 at 100, not 200.

Impact on Weapon Damage Profiles

A perfect example of the impact of these changes is with the 120 RPM hand cannon, like Ignas Hammer. It used to kill any resilience level with two headshots and one body shot, even if they had 100 resilience. Now, however, if they even just run 70 resilience, they’ll live. To kill them, you’re forced to hit a headshot with all three bullets, and in that case, it’s a big deal because the last bullet you fire is the least accurate.

With such a major change, Bungie realized that they had to redo the entire damage profile for all 1,000+ weapons in the game. They all deal new damages now, and you may have noticed that in the previous updates. The old Ignas Hammer used to deal 80 to the head, but the new one deals 89. This left the community with a lot of questions, such as which weapons got stronger, which got weaker, and whether they need to redo their builds with different resilience levels.

Understanding Weapon Damage and Resilience Levels

If we use that same Ignas Hammer example again, let’s zoom in on it from the sheet. It’s an aggressive archetype hand cannon with a 120 RPM for its rate of fire. It tells us the damage like 47 to the body, and there’s that 88.154 to the head. Then, on the right-hand side of the table, we have the resilience levels from zero all the way to tier six.

It says 2H 1B, that means two headshots and one body shot, just like I showed you in the footage, that’ll kill all of those resilience levels. But then at tier 7 resilience, it’s highlighted in blue and says 3H, 0B—that’s because you need those three headshots. We call this an accuracy breakpoint. If I were to add the time to kills here, underneath, they’re all at 1 second still, but at seven resilience, it at least forces your opponent to be more accurate.

Impact of Resilience on Time to Kill

To be super clear here, I want to bring in another example: a rapid-fire auto rifle. From 0 to four resilience, it kills with nine headshots and one body shot, that’s 10 bullets total. At five resilience, it’s blue again, just like the Ignas; it now needs all headshots. It’s still 10 bullets, but 10 crits and no body.

That’ll kill 60 resilience, 70 all the way up to 90 even. But then at tier 10, or 100 resilience, it changes again, and this time it’s orange. It says nine headshots and two body shots, which is 11 bullets. This is what we call a TTK (time to kill) breakpoint. In other words, sometimes you force your opponent to be more accurate, but sometimes you literally force them to shoot extra bullets. I took all of this information and created one graph that.

Visualizing Changes in Destiny’s Sandbox

First, I’m going to show you what the old sandbox looked like and then what it is today so that you can really see the comparison. I wanted to mention that my analyses often take hundreds of hours to produce, and I’ve started a Patreon for those who would like to join, whether it’s to contribute at a base level or for extra perks at the higher levels. This makes the hours spent on every analysis possible. I ask that you take a look and consider joining.

Here’s the first graph showing you the strength of resilience in the old sandbox; on the bottom is resilience from 0 to 100. The bars represent how many breakpoints are at each level, just like those two examples I showed you. Another way of seeing it is like how many weapon archetypes are going to get stopped at this resilience level. At zero, you just die to everything, so it’s blank, but then if you just go up one level of resilience, you’ll start to slow a few weapons down. They’re no longer going to be able to kill like they did before.

Understanding Optimal Resilience Levels

Some of you might notice that 30, 60, and 90 are the three highest bars. This is what most people used to run in the old sandbox, as it was known for a long time as kind of the best bang for your buck. Instead of 30, 60, and 90 from before, it’s now 40, 60, and 70. Don’t screenshot this yet, though, because I actually have much better information.

I just wanted to show you what this looks like when you’re viewing the whole game at once. What’s more important, though, is that earlier I mentioned how the meta can really change what’s optimal, and that’s because this graph has two critical issues.

Refining the Data for Accurate Analysis

The first critical issue is removing the useless weapons. Like I said, that data had every archetype in the game, but wouldn’t you agree that most Titans use SMGs, or you’ve been seeing a lot more auto rifles lately? Wouldn’t you agree that hand cannons are used a lot more than scout rifles? So surely, we need to weight these things differently. The second critical thing is that some of those breakpoints don’t really matter that much. For example, if you force a 140 hand cannon to shoot a fourth bullet, the time to kill on it is going to go from 0.87 seconds all the way up to 1.3 seconds.

Refining Weapon Impact Analysis in Destiny

That’s a massive difference, adding just one bullet. But then, if I said the same thing about a 900 RPM SMG going from 11 bullets to 12, it’s not very impactful. Sure, it’s adding an extra bullet, but you’re barely changing the time to kill. The answer to these two questions comes from a very smart individual named Giraffe.

He found a way to take all of that into account and button it up for me. For number one, to deal with the popularity of weapons, he used Destiny Tracker. He can filter by trials, quick play, all of it at once; it’s extremely helpful and shows you how way more people are using Summoner compared to, say, Ry’s Throwing Knife. He’s able to import all of those weightings into the data; it’s like space magic.

Enhancing Data Relevance with Weighted Breakpoints

Then, for number two, he was also able to take every single breakpoint and weight them relatively based on how impactful they are. For instance, forcing that hand cannon to do extra work is way more noticeable than a high rate of fire SMG. Lo and behold, the final table, and there are some really interesting things to it. The first two rows are just resilience and health, easy peasy.

The second row is called relative impact. This basically measures how much benefit you get from moving up one tier. So, for instance, let’s say you’re running 20 resilience and you’re curious what happens if I bump up to 30. Well, it’s kind of a waste; you barely get any benefit now going from 20 to 30. But say you were at 50 resilience, then it’s a huge benefit to get up to 60, and worth sacrificing one of your other stats. Essentially, red equals bad, green equals good.

Optimal Resilience Levels and Meta Influence

The third row is just a total; it shows you how much “stuff” you block as you go up. Obviously, the more health you have, the more things you live against, so the number goes up with it. I included that just to show the cumulative nature. But what I care about is that colored row. It shows that 20, 60, 70, and 90 are the best bang for your buck now. At this point, I now had two sources of info.

There was the original process which looked at every single weapon in the game and that said 40, 60, and 70. This new method, which is more realistic, says 20, 60, 70, and 90. A great example of why 40 is so high in the first but then so low in the other one is because it blocks a lot of weapons, but they’re just not popular. After working on this for so long, it’s crazy how much the meta really does change what’s optimal. And of course, that makes sense, but I still felt like I wanted to go one step further. For a third source of information to kind of cross-check my work, I went to some of the best players in the world, like Walla, Defizzle, Gold Eagle, and Cami Cakes.