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What is better in terms of defence / priority for the following. E.g damage reduction.

Gaining a FNP, 5+ Ignore Wounds.

Improving a 4+ INV Save to a 3+.

A model without an INV save, gaining a 4+ INV save.

Reducing the damage of enemy attacks by 1 [ to a min of 1]

The whole concept is non named characters gain perks over time during a long campaign. It's based on the rules of CA Perks + Gaining Xp. That I combined.

e.g
1st perk
2nd perk
...
8th perk

So there is an order to choose meta game kinda..

First, here's my rankings. However, some important explanations follow:

#1 - Gaining a 4++ if you didn't previously have one.
#2 - Gaining a 5+++.
#3 - Improving a 4++ to a 3++.
#4 - Reducing dmg by 1 to minimum of 1.

So, the caveats to all of this is that each of these can be situationally more powerful than others in certain situations. Reducing damage by 1 to a minimum of 1 doesn't matter at all if your opponent's attacks all deal 1 damage (say, a whole ton of attacks from a squad of Genestealers), but it will cut the efficiency of a 2-dmg attack by 50% (say, being shot by a Knight's Avenger Gatling Cannon). At the same time, it will still be pretty ineffective at reducing the damage of a Reaper Chainsword (Damage 6) - you're likely still just dead.

As such, you can't fully trust the "math" here, because the meta will change how effective some of these are or aren't. The best you can do is look at what's likely to happen or not happen, and the best way to do that is to try and figure how much less damage are characters with these damage mitigation abilities taking?

Going from no Inv to a 4+ Inv means you get 50% damage reduction against any attack that would remove your armour save, but will give 0% damage reduction against any attack that wouldn't reduce your armour at all, given that your existing armour is at least a 4+. If your armour save is worse than 4+ already, then this is pretty awesome. Given that characters usually can screen out being shot pretty easily, the most likely threats are enemy close combat characters, most of whom often have attacks with a -3AP weapon, which mostly nullifies most base saves. It's pretty safe to assume that having a 4+ Inv after not having any Inv means that gaining one gives you 50% damage mitigation.

Improving an Inv from 4+ to 3+ is pretty huge. As stated, it's most likely to come up in close combat, but at 3+, it's also very possibly better than the model's armour even against attacks without any AP. Against AP -1 attacks, which many basic units still have (Genestealers), you effectively nullify any loss of armour from a 3+ save ever. It's important to note here now that while you're "only" gaining an additional 16.7% more damage mitigation over a 4+ Inv, we are more concerned here with comparing it to the other cases of "how much more" effective it is. In this case, you are saving one third of all the attacks that wouldn't have been saved by the 4+ Inv, so really, you're improving your damage mitigation here by 33.3%.

FNP damage mitigation, especially of the 5+ variety, is both awesome and awful. There's no bypassing FNP - you will always get it, regardless of whether or not your enemy can even ignore your Inv saves. However, it also means that if an attack gets through, you have to make the roll against each and every point of damage, so you flatten out the damage curves of many attacks. This means that it's equally effective against both large numbers of attacks with low damage, and few numbers of attacks with high damage. FNP becomes especially unhelpful when some enemies can dish out massive numbers of mid-damage attacks (like a Daemon Prince with two Malefic Talons). FNP of 5+ will always mitigate 33.3% of any attacks that wouldn't be mitigated by the character's existing defences. As such, it's tied for gross numerical improvement with improving your INV save, but since this one means you always get the improvement, even against Smite, and the INV improvement doesn't, I'm going to say this one is better than gaining the 3+ Inv.

Lastly, we have the straight damage reduction. Like I said at the start, this one is really, REALLY hard to quantify, simply because it depends on what your opponent is hitting you with. Against Dmg 2 attacks, you get a 50% reduction, which is fantastic because it's guaranteed. Against Dmg 3 attacks, you get a 33.3% reduction. Against Dmg D3 attacks, this is an average of 33.3% reduction as well. But against Dmg 1 attacks, it's a 0% reduction, and against Dmg D6 attacks it's a 23.8% reduction. Given that the 0% reduction is the most frequent, we can give it more weight, and the overall average would be somewhere less than 33.3% (possibly far lower; if we said half of all attacks against the character are Dmg 1 attacks, with all the others being equal, then the average damage mitigation would be 19.4%), which puts this ability squarely in the bottom.

Thx for the informative post. Yeah the meta will be very unique. My Vigilus Campaign is a No units with the Vehicle keyword. House Rules/Re-Written GW rules. That focuses on powerful non named characters due to the ability to gain really powerful buffs. The setting is basically my own version of the 40k universe with my own armies starting battle on Vigilus and creating my own personal story and narrative as a result of the games I play.

The main point is that Warlords get to start the first mission they play with 1 Perk. So the choice matters. Additional Perks are earned by Xp gained over the course of the battle/campaign.