I’m wondering if the same armor issue may be applying to some of the stygian purge raiders as well. I just did a t2 purge (realised I’d forgotten to complete the journey step, so just fired off a quick one) and there was a small group of raiders (I think listed as Stygian Vanguard) that seemed to take far longer to kill than expected. The Hand of War went down as quick as normal, but these (supposedly low-level) raiders took a lot more effort to deal with.