This is a bad idea. The only reason shield tanking is viable is because they have higher strafe speeds than armor tanked suits. Armor plates already have a more than sufficient strafe penalty. I'd recommend just reducing heavies and scouts base strafe speeds and not touching any other stats.

Ok, so I've been reading through all the arguments for this thread and I've come to the conclusion that CCP's original idea for fixing strafing will not work unless something is also done about shield penalties... Meaning the following:

!) For BOTH armor plates and shields extenders, they should be changed to a percentage system so that they become more tailored to the dropsuit they are being fitted on. This way "brick tanking" things that should be releatively lower EHP will not happen.

2) Imposing a movement penalty (ie. speed/strafe/mass) is good for armor plates and makes sense, however it does NOT make sense for shields.

3) For shield extenders, there should be one or possibly two drawbacks (and NOT have the recharge delay as one of them)... First they should affect the signature of the dropsuit so that they are almost one class size larger for detection purposes (light goes to medium, medium to heavy, heavy to LAV, LAV to HAV, HAV... welll no one hides those). Second it should increase the HITBOX of the dropsuit such that they are easier to HIT by players. These two changes would effectively mimic the drawback of shield extenders in EVE for spaceships. In EVE, adding armor plates adds mass, greater mass reduces top speed, acceration, and agility (turning/alignment time). In EVE, adding shield extenders makes the ship's signature radius bloom to a larger size and thus guns that would normally not be able to track and hit the smaller ships are subsequently able to do so.

This sort of change would be a BETTER and more comprehensive FIX for the situation that has caused this line of discussion.