I'm going to throw one final design that I have had evaluated. It is possible to penalize one class over the other. So we can do

if scout then worse plate penalty for example.

Another thing is that we are able to focus the penalty on strafing specifically.

So the idea would be to penalize forward movement less on "normal plates", but severely decrease strafe speed, and more on the scout than other classes. Reactives and ferros would not incur these hard penalties.

This would mean Amarr Sentinels become very unwieldy, bastions like they were supposed to be, but weak to being headshotted at range, and brick tanked scouts will always have speed less than equal ehp assaults.

Let the fireworks begin.

I came up with an idea. One of the problems with scouts is that their ewar is so good, and it is always on. I made a post about how I disliked the idea of cloak fields reducing scan range as it cancels out your ewar skills and mods to have it active. THis means you're less likely to use them, and more likely to brick out instead of use things they get bonuses to. What if instead things went like this:

1. Take scout's base ewar range to 10, and increase their profile to 40db.
2. Add a multiplier to scanning range while cloaked, and add a minimum cloak duration (maybe 3 seconds).
3. (optional) Increase cloak dampening by 5% per level

This gives scouts 2 modes. Combat ready and relatively blind, and defenseless ewar mode. You can cloak up to gather information, but to engage an enemy you make yourself blind. A minimum cloak duration prevents quick activation so you can't just get quick pulses of intel, and it encourages use of better cloak fields for scouting. You can possibly scale ewar range bonus to equipment tier, or add different types of cloaks with different modifiers to duration, range, dampening, cooldown etc.

In short, scouts will be encouraged to use their scout cloak field bonus. They can provide intel and be stealthy (what scouts want) but only temporarily. Any scout that wants to be a stealthy brawler can try, but they won't have the massive ewar stats while doing it.