Hit points

Hit points (HP) represent how much damage a hero or object can take. The health bar shows the amount of HP, divided into bars each worth 25.

A hero's HP is "low" at 50% and "critical" at 25%. Their location will be shown to all friendly healers.

If a hero's HP becomes 35% or lower, a gasp sound effect is played and blood appears around the borders of the screen. The exception to this is 150 HP heroes who get it at 70 HP.

Priority Order


When being healed, the priority order is Health > Armor > Shields.

When taking damage, the priority order is Non-Recoverable HP (Shields > Armor) > Recoverable HP (Shields > Armor > Health). The only exception is EMP, which only damages shields and bypasses any temporary armor.

If there are shields above armor, and an instance of damage destroys the shields and damages the armor, armor will reduce that damage based on how much damage the armor would take. For example, suppose Wrecking Ball has 99 temporary shields from Adaptive Shield and he gets hit by Fire Strike (100 damage). The armor would take 1 damage, a number less than 10, so it reduces the damage by 0.5 instead of 5. Wrecking Ball takes 99.5 damage from the Fire Strike.

Recoverable HP
HP that can be healed. There are three types: health, armor, and shields.

Health
The most basic form of HP is health. Health is depleted when there is no armor or shields to protect it, and is the first to be replenished when being healed.

If a hero's health comes to 0, they will die.

Health is colored white.

Armor
Some heroes have a type of HP called armor. For every instance of damage, armor reduces the damage by 5, but it cannot reduce it by more than 50%. In other words, armor halves any damage that is lower than 10, instead of taking away 5.

Armor is extremely effective against attacks that consist of multiple instances of damage (e.g. shotguns) and is less effective against single instances of damage that are above 10. Even if the armor runs out, as long as there was a single point of armor before taking damage, the damage will be reduced.

Against beams and damage-over-time effects, armor works differently: armor reduces the damage of beams by 30% and does nothing against damage-over-time.

Armor is the very last damage modifier to be applied. For example, if a fortified Orisa would take 100 damage, Fortify reduces it to 60, then armor takes away another 5; the damage becomes 55. If she would take 10 damage, Fortify reduces it to 6, then because 6 is less than 10, armor halves it; the damage becomes 3.

Armor is colored yellow.


 * Beam-type damage (30% reduction)
 * Echo: Focusing Beam
 * Mei: Endothermic Blaster (primary fire)
 * Moira: Biotic Grasp (alternate fire), Coalescence
 * Symmetra: Photon Projector (primary fire), Sentry Turret
 * Winston: Tesla Cannon
 * Zarya: Particle Cannon (primary fire)


 * Damage-over-time effects (no reduction)
 * Ana: Biotic Rifle
 * Ashe: Dynamite
 * Hanzo: Dragonstrike
 * Mei: Blizzard
 * Moira: Biotic Orb
 * Torbjörn: Molten Core (also does additional damage to armor)
 * Widowmaker: Venom Mine
 * Zarya: Graviton Surge

Shields
Some heroes have a type of HP called shields. Symmetra's Teleporter also has some shields.

Shields automatically regenerate at a rate of 30 shields per second after avoiding damage for 3 seconds. This is treated as a form of healing, meaning Biotic Grenade can amplify or block it.

Shields are destroyed by Sombra's EMP.

Shields are colored cyan.

Barrier health is a type of shield health.
 * Barrier Health

The main difference between barrier health and regular shields is their regeneration: Barrier health only regenerates while the barrier is inactive, meaning only recallable barriers can regenerate. Furthermore, the delay before regeneration is 2 seconds instead of 3, and the regeneration rate varies between barriers.

Non-Recoverable HP
HP that cannot be healed and are only temporary, generated by hero abilities.

There are three types of non-recoverable HP: health, armor and shields. Non-recoverable HP always goes on top of recoverable HP.

Temporary Health
Non-recoverable health takes damage with no special effects, like regular health.

Temporary health is colored pale teal.

Temporary health is currently unavailable outside of the Workshop, where it can be applied to a player with the Add Health Pool to Player action.

Temporary Armor
Non-recoverable armor reduces damage like regular armor.

Temporary armor is colored orange.

Abilities that grant Temporary Armor:

Brigitte:


 * Rally: Provides self and nearby allies up to 100 temporary armor at a rate of 15 armor per 0.5 seconds. Lasts 30 seconds

Torbjörn:


 * Overload: Provides self 100 temporary armor. Lasts 5 seconds

Temporary Shields
Non-recoverable shields, or temporary personal shields,   are susceptible to EMP like regular shields but do not regenerate and often decay by themselves.

Temporary shields are colored dark blue.

Abilities that grant Temporary Shields:

Doomfist:


 * The Best Defense...: Creates up to 150 temporary shields to self, 30 for each target hit with a normal ability and 75 for each target hit with Meteor Strike. Decays at 3 shields per second after 1 second

Lúcio:


 * Sound Barrier: Creates 750 temporary shields to self and all allies within range. Decays at shields per second

Sigma:


 * Kinetic Grasp: Converts 60% of damage absorbed into temporary shields. Decays at 7 shields per second after 3 seconds

Wrecking Ball:


 * Adaptive Shield: Creates 100 temporary shields to self, plus 75 additional shields per enemy within range. Lasts 7 seconds. Does not give enemies ultimate charge if damaged

Trivia

 * If armor is hit, a metallic sound effect is played.
 * If a hero's base shields are destroyed, the screen becomes cracked.
 * The bleed effect originally occurred when a hero's HP became 75 or lower. Since this was highly inefficient for Tanks, it was replaced with a more relativistic system.
 * Armor originally treated the "ticks" of beams and damage-over-time effects as instances of damage. In general, beams and DoT tick once every 0.192 seconds (e.g. 50 DPS = 9.6 damage per 0.192 seconds). This means that most beams and DoT effects were reduced by ~26 DPS, and beams/DoT effects that did less than ~52 DPS were halved by armor.
 * With the change to 30% reduction for beams, beams that did less than ~87 DPS were buffed against armor while beams that did more were nerfed.
 * Ana's Biotic Rifle inflicts a short DoT effect for its 70 damage, but the damage is unevenly split (2.24 + 6.72 + 26.88 + 26.88 + 7.28). As a result, it used to do damage against armor.
 * The priority order for damage was originally shields (non-recoverable, then recoverable), then armor (non-recoverable, then recoverable), and then health. This meant that the armor provided by Rally would go underneath the shields of heroes such as Zenyatta.
 * The Patch Notes for Patch 1.33.0.1, which issued this change, mentions "non-recoverable health" when listing the new priority order. Currently, non-recoverable health is only accessible through workshop scripts, and is therefore inaccessible in standard play.
 * Symmetra originally had an ability called Photon Shield which allowed her to create 25 recoverable shields for her teammates. When Symmetra got her first rework, Photon Shield was removed and Shield Generator was added, which gave all surrounding teammates 75 recoverable shields. This too was removed upon Symmetra's second rework. Photon Shield and Shield Generator were the only ways heroes could have recoverable HP that were not found on their base HP.
 * B.O.B. is treated as an additional teammate, so he is affected by abilities that grant non-recoverable HP to allies, such as Sound Barrier and Rally. B.O.B. is the only non-hero that can have additional HP.
 * The term "shields" is often informally used to refer to barriers.
 * Since barriers have shields for their HP, anything that exclusively damages shields also damages barriers. Currently, the only ability that does that is EMP; however, in the beta, Pharah's Concussive Blast used to be able to do 700 damage to shields and barriers.