Hi guys,

A quick heads up for some upcoming changes in 1.4 to armour and movement.

Currently a bug has caused some of the movement speed modifiers on strafe to be ignored. This is good and bad. ItGÇÖs good because faster strafe speeds are cool. ItGÇÖs bad because right now strafe speed is at least 1:1 with run speed and this was not our intention. In keeping with normal physical limitations strafe was intended to be slower than run. We had planned to raise the strafe speed from the 1.1 build to around 80% of run speed (it was lurking around 60-70% or so depending on frame). After seeing how popular (and fun) the higher strafe speeds have been we changed our minds. We still wanted to maintain a difference between forward and sideways movement but we didnGÇÖt want to make a significant reduction to the speeds. So weGÇÖve settled on strafe speed as 90% of run speed across all suits.

Before anyone freaks out, this does not mean it is set in stone forevermore. It just means that we want to play the game with the settings we actually intended so we can properly judge them. There are a lot of updates to the game in 1.4 so weGÇÖll be watching very closely to see what we need to respond to :-)

A nice thing that also came out of this is that I found some errant numbers and a bug that were causing the heavy frames to move too slowly backwards as well as reducing their strafe speed. Both of those problems are now fixed as well.

Also as promised on IRC yesterday IGÇÖm also sharing the buffs weGÇÖve made to armour plates.

Couple of caveats:
- We'd like to introduce a penalty to shield tanking (most likely increasing the delay on shield recharge when you use shield extenders) but we wanted to buff armor first. We will be watching 1.4 closely and if necessary, add the shield delay in 1.5.
- Role skills still need to be updated to better take advantage of armor tanking.

* Adjusted Armor Plate attributes - HP bonus of 85/110/135 (Basic/Enhanced/Complex) and speed penalties of 2%/3%/5% (with full skill bonuses this equates to 93.5/121/148.5)
* Adjusted Ferroscale Plate attributes - HP bonus of 35/50/75 (with full skill bonuses this equates to 38.5/55/82.5)
* Adjusted Reactive Plate attributes - HP bonus of 25/40/60 and speed penalties of 0%/1%/1% (with full skill bonuses this equates to 27.5/44/66)

Cheers

CCP Wolfman