I’ve been having trouble going to T4+ planets to fight monsters since they kill me so fast, especially cuttletrunks. So I made some observations about how armor and resistance affects the damage taken to learn how to combat this. Please say something if this is incorrect, my testing isn’t as comprehensive as it could be so correct me if this is wrong.
A monster hits you for kinetic damage. First we subtract the kinetic armor value from it to get the actual damage the hit will do to you. If it’s 0 it’s armor repelled. If it’s >0 we roll a dice and depending on your resist chance the damage will either be negated, or be applied to you.
Observations on the attacks patterns of 3 random wild cuttletrunks:
A wild Stout Cuttletrunk on a T4 world
Blue health bar - Basic attack
Green health bar - Basic attack
80% HP - Bomb and basic attack
60% HP - Arching blue and homing, bomb and basic attack
If it was spawned from a meteor portal it has all attacks available from the get go? Couldn’t test this because they killed me even with all armor skills in no time 
Observations on how armor and resistance skills affect the damage taken:
The numbers mean kinetic armor, resistance, impulse armor, resistance, armor epic
5 5 5 5 E = 0 damage
5 0 5 0 E = 0 damage
3 0 5 0 E = Homing blue attacks start doing damage
3 5 5 0 E = Homing blue attacks still do damage, but less often
2 0 5 0 E = Base and arching blue attacks start doing damage
5 0 3 0 E = Bombs start doing damage
5 0 3 5 E = Bombs still do damage, but less often
Your maximum health (and thus the color of your health bar) has no effect on the damage taken. If somebody can explain why the health bar changes color to blue when you take some vitality that’d be great. Also the cuttletrunk blue homing attack is kinetic, not impulse even though it’s an explosion. This is something that threw me off.
Resistance skills give you a flat change to resist damage from an attack. With the epic and 5 points it’s 50% chance to resist the damage and negate it.
So to survive a T4+ world armor skills aren’t going to be as useful as before since you can’t negate all the damage taken anymore. Even with full armor skills and the epic, a mob that does over 450 damage per hit will go through your armor and some of them the possible resists too. And there’s lots of attacks that do this, wildstock charges, strong+ cuttletrunks (even lvl 1 meteors start spawning cuttletrunks all the way up to elite).
You need a large health pool and keep it filled to survive higher tiers. Armor will still help you, it shaves off some of the dps so you don’t have to heal as much, but you aren’t invincible anymore.
Can more experienced hunters explain what’s their strategy with skills, consumables and fighting style to survive high tier meteors?