Vainglory Forums

Hey, I'm here to ask what's really the difference btwn prc & shred. If pierce calculation is
% Pierce * WP + (1 - % Pierce) * WP / (1 + Armor / 100) = New Damage
But what is shred? I know pierce & shred do the same but I heard that pierce allows a percentage of your damage to become true dmg & shred decreases enemy's armor. And I didn't really understand the shred part in Bluebadger's guide. Can someone explain?

I'm not really good with the technicalities and calculations, but here is what I know about armor shred and armor pierce.

Armor shred is when you tear up your opponents armor. It makes some part of it useless.
Armor pierce is when a percent of your damage bypasses the opponents armor.

If you have a lot of weapon items, I suggest getting armor pierce items, because armor pierce is based on percent, so the more weapon power you have, the bigger the damage for the percent.

If you don't have much, I would get a Bonesaw. The enemy might not have armor, but it will shred through the enemy's base armor, so your damage will do a ton of more damage.

Like what's already been said, armor shred actually removes armor. One major benefit of this is that when an enemy's armor is lower then all your teams' damage against them will increase. With armor pierce, only your own damage will penetrate as true damage. I haven't done any math but from experience armor shred really helps take down Cat/Ardan/Phinn who have bought high armor like metal jacket.

Yes, but I tried Bluebadger's calculation with the pierce calculation
And also tried the shred calculation (with the same stats)
However, the answer wasn't same. Does that means that pierce & shred aren't the same or the calculation was wrong?

They are definitely not the same thing. I don't know what exactly you calculated and what you mean by 'answer' but I don't see any meaningful way to compare the two mathematically since the benefit of shred depends a lot on the situation (how much wp do your team have overall? are you attacking alone or as a group? How many stacks of shred have you applied?)

Unlike comparing pierce to pure wp where the comparison is somewhat straight forward since you can just compare the final damage per hit given a hypothetical amount of armor your opponent has. Even then, it won't necessarily tell you which is better because it depends on the team you're up against too; remember you're attacking 3 heroes not just one, some with less armor than others. So I wouldn't recommend making decisions based on any numbers you calculate here, but understand how they work and the benefit of each so you'll make better judgement in game on what you should focus on.

Based on personal experience, and some theorycrafting, it is always better to get shred over pierce. Shred reduces the armour of an enemy for the entire team, and scales better than pierce when your enemy builds heavy armour (anything above tier 1 armour)