ARC Raiders damage calculator: shots to kill through shield and plating
Pick a weapon, a shield and where you hit, then see how much damage reaches health and how many shots the target takes.
How we calculate
The maths runs in one pass and in a fixed order: plating takes its cut from the base shot damage first, the shield takes its cut from what is left, and only the remainder reaches health. The model is linear rather than additive, so two sources of mitigation multiply together instead of adding up as percentages. Shots to kill is the ceiling of health divided by damage per shot, and time to kill counts the gaps between shots after the first one, which is one fewer than the shots themselves.
A shield works while it still holds at least one point of charge. At zero the mitigation disappears entirely, unlike PUBG, where a destroyed vest keeps cutting part of the damage. That is why shield charge is a separate field here: a full shield and an empty one give two different numbers, and both of them are honest.
Three things we deliberately do not compute, because the sources do not have them. The formula for energy weapons against a shield is not established, so picking such a weapon shows a status instead of a number. The list of ARC machines and the critical multipliers on their weak points are not established either, so the machine branch stays disabled. The mapping from an Arc Alloy tier to a specific percentage could not be traced: only a bracket is known, so a result with plating comes out as a range rather than a single number.
Sources
checked 18 August 2026
Questions and answers
Why does plating give a range instead of one number?
Because the mapping from an Arc Alloy tier to a specific percentage is not established. The source the bracket came from no longer opens, and these percentages could not be traced independently. Showing one number would mean inventing a tier we do not know, so we give the bounds: how much damage arrives against the strongest plating and against the weakest.
Why is there no result for energy weapons?
The formula for how an energy shot meets shield and plating is described nowhere. One source even claims ammunition type has no effect on shields at all, but that is a claim rather than a measured model. Until a number exists, the tool honestly says it is not established instead of borrowing the kinetic model.
Why is time to kill missing for some weapons?
Fire rate in rounds per minute is published for only some weapons. The rest show an internal scale in the infobox, and there is nothing to convert that scale into rounds: the ratio between scale and rounds differs from weapon to weapon, so no single formula exists. Where fire rate is missing we show neither time to kill nor damage per second.
Why does an empty shield stop helping entirely?
That is how the mechanic works: a shield cuts its percentage while charge remains and drops out of the calculation as soon as charge runs out. It differs from PUBG, where a destroyed vest keeps cutting part of the damage. That is why shield charge is a field here rather than an assumption.
Can damage against ARC machines be calculated?
Not yet. Open sources carry no list of machines and no critical multipliers for their weak points, and the headshot multiplier applies to raiders rather than machines. The branch stays disabled until numbers appear that can be cited with a link.
Unofficial tool. Not affiliated with Embark Studios.