Just take the shield penalty away?

It never really mattered that much to keep it, imo. The "penalty" that shield users have against armor is that they can't be stacked on the same way. You can't stack damage mods and can't get 450+ shields with little effort. You do have mobility and a big repair once it starts up. Buff the other shield based modules of course, along with nerfing the fitting usage of the Reactive Plates and Ferroscale Modules(although I'd argue also giving Ferroscales a small speed penalty as well because having 500+ Armor on someone with base speed is damn near OP in my book).

The proposed shield stats put their costs lower than armor.

Putting aside the balance issues. The "high" slots are so-called because they're "high power", right? This is as opposed to "low power" slots. Is it logical that the "high power" module that is literally an energy shield requires less power than the "low power" module that is literally armored plates?

The proposed shield stats put their costs lower than armor.

Putting aside the balance issues. The "high" slots are so-called because they're "high power", right? This is as opposed to "low power" slots. Is it logical that the "high power" module that is literally an energy shield requires less power than the "low power" module that is literally armored plates?

Fixed it in the OP, as well as adding other reasons why to increase shield extenders

I have my own issues with armor plates. As far as buffing or making large shifts to shield or armor balance, I think it might be wise to keep to changes that make the current growth of power reqs/penalties linear across both regular shields and armor instead of more marked changes.

Why? Well, they're about to release a bunch of new suits, nerf damage mods, drop damage on several weapons, and they were considering nerfs to proficiency at the same time. It all adds up to a huge set of changes. Fix the linear bit, then see about adjust hp after the huge set of changes.

I have a suspicion that the nerf to damage mods might make shield extenders more popular -- Since there's no drawback to dual tanking and practically nothing else useful for high slots. The lack of viable high slot options has to be made apparent to CCP before they'll take the notion of shield changes seriously because all their data now shows that they're super popular.

The biggest difference is the fact that "teamwork" is treated as a balancing factor between shields and armor.

Armor gets pathetically low reps, and if you want to increase it by any respectable amount you need to sacrifice TONS of armor health to achieve a very small amount of health regeneration.

However, you could just stack plates in all your lows and rely on repair hives and repair tools to achieve greater health AND greater regen than shields (no delay, higher regen per second). This is not okay.

Armor should have a small native regeneration rate rather than none at all. Shields need their own version of "repair tools" and "repair hives" that give them shield related benefits. And CCP, just please get rid of all the penalties. The only reason shields have a penalty is because armor has one (for some reason).

The only logical reason I can think of why armor plates must have a speed penalty is so that we won't have scouts running at full speed with 700+ armor health. That's fine, but there are other solutions to that. Armor penalty is just lazy and penalizes other suits that don't need to be penalized. CCP needs to design suits so that modules affect them differently than another suit of a different frame.

Light suits get less hp from a plate/extender than mediums.
Mediums get less hp from a plate/extender than heavies.

Light suits get more reps from repairs/rechargers than mediums.
Mediums get more reps from repairs/rechargers than heavies.

And so on....

And i'm sure CCP could design an even better system. However, they are working with old designs from years ago that they are trying to salvage, back when they thought they could make any piece of trash as quick as they can (I'm actually thankful they didn't release PVE in 2012, would have been another rushed piece of garbage).

Oh, and things like PG, CPU, and ISK are very, very, very, VERY minor balancing points. They have nothing to do with moment to moment gameplay, so they should not be considered when balancing armor and shields for moment to moment gameplay.

If your going to remove the Speed penalty from Armor, and give it natural regen, Extenders better see a buff.

Or Plates better see a nerf.

One of the two.