Destiny 2 best armour stats for each class: should you roll with Mobility, Resilience, Recovery or a mix of all three?

Destiny 2 gives you some freedom to choose how your character plays. Does it really make a difference? What’s the best build? Let’s dive in.

In Destiny 2, armour generally comes with a basic tendency towards one of the three primary stats – Mobility (jump height and base run speed), Resilience (defence) or Recovery (how fast your health regenerates after taking damage. You can modify this weighting by selecting from available nodes on the equipment inspect screen, or customise it even further with mods.

As part of our Destiny 2 guide, here’s a full explanation of how armour stats work, how you can customise them, and thanks to Arekkz, answers on whether it’s worth it and what you’ll get out of it.

So whether you’re looking to min-max your whole Destiny 2 build or just patch a bit of a hole, here’s the deal with the best armour set ups in destiny 2.

How do you change your stats in Destiny 2?

Let’s talk about how your stats are calculated in Destiny 2. For starters, each class is granted a set of free points across various statistics:

• Titans
  • Mobility: 0
  • Resilience: 5
  • Recovery: 0
• Hunters
  • Mobility: 4
  • Resilience: 1
  • Recovery: 0
• Warlocks
  • Mobility: 0
  • Resilience: 1
  • Recovery: 4

As you can see, an unmodded Destiny 2 character already has a tendency towards one stat over others. You can alter this base set by equipping armour sets which favour each stat – there are sets that primarily bump up your Mobility, sets that focus on Resilience, and others that provide extra Recovery.

All the armour set 2 follow the same pattern of stat nodes, regardless of which Destiny 2 Activity you earn them in. set you select, the nodes you can choose from are set by class as follows:

• Titan
  • Helmet, Legs: Mobility/Recovery
  • Gauntlets, Chest: Resilience/Recovery
• Hunter
  • Helmet, Legs: Resilience/Recovery
  • Gauntlets, Chest: Mobility/Recovery
• Warlock
  • Helmet, Legs: Recovery/Mobility
  • Gauntlets, Chest: Resilience/Mobility

Those are your base choices, then, and you can pack these out further with mods. In our discussion of the best mods in Destiny 2, we suggested focusing on ability mods, but left one slot free for a wildcard choice – which may well be a stat boost. Here are your options:

• Gauntlets: Mobility
• Helmet: Resilience
• Legs: Recovery
• Titan Mark: Resilience
• Hunter Cloak: Mobility
• Warlock Bond: Recovery

No matter how you combine your armour, selected nodes and mods, only Titans can reach 10 Resilience, only Hunters can reach 10 Mobility and only Warlocks can reach 10 Recovery.

Apart from that hard rule, you can see what combinations are even possible for your class and armour type, on this fantastic spreadsheet from the Crucible Playbook Reddit.

So how much difference does it make?

Breaking it down stat by stat, there’s a noticeable difference in waling speed between Mobility 4 and 9, for example. Since this doesn’t affect sprint speed it may not feel as dramatic, but the real effect is on strafe movements peed. Especially in Crucible, players tend to sidestep back and forth to avoid incoming fire while maintaining their own attacks – and an increase to mobility means you break out of your opponent’s sights and their auto-aim field much more efficiently.

Whether you find increased strafe speed useful depends on your playstyle, really, and while it may be worth looking into for the Crucible, in a PvE situation you may bet better off using that mod slot for something that recharges your grenade, melee or class ability more frequently instead.

Pushing your Recovery stat up really speeds up your health regain after damage. In the video you can watch the bars fill up at Recovery stat 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, and the difference between top and bottom is significant. No wonder Warlocks always win firefights when two wounded Guardians disengage and then go at it again shortly thereafter! Higher Recovery seems to make a tremendous difference in all situations, and is definitely always worth pursuing.

As for Resilience, we have the data thanks to the hard work of the Massive Breakdown team, who shared data on this subject publicly as part of their ongoing efforts to make Destiny 2 less baffling.

The answer turns out to be that the first five points of Resilience are pretty tasty, granting you a boost of 2 points of defence each, but that the next five only grant you one extra point of defence each. So while you can min-max for pure tankiness, from an investment point of view, throwing those points into Recovery is more likely to be worth the effort.

Ideally, we’d recommend aiming for a minimum of 4 Resilience and then pushing Recovery as hard as you can. You can refer to the spreadsheet linked in the section above for combinations that will yield the result you’re after. Mobility is your dump stat here unless you’re a real Crucible hound who strafes constantly.