To be fair, most well fitted suits use ferroscale and reactive over armour plates. It's the double strafe penalty that makes them bad. I understand it was needed to combat the efficiency that plates provided for scouts, but it is a bad design and makes the extra hp not really worth it.

Hp mods should always have been percentage based, then we wouldn't have this problem.

IIRC, Rattati implemented a scout-specific strafe penalty to plates somewhere around HF Delta. If plate movement penalties can be applied on a frame-by-frame basis, it stands to reason that movement penalties could be lessened when plates are equipped by Sentinels (or all heavy frames, for that matter). If such a thing is possible, and heavy/sentinel/commando performance is down, I can't think of any good reason why not to try it.

As for most people preferring ferro, that would make sense. What other module in the game can you stack without diminishing returns or a single drawback/penalty?

Edit: I'd even get behind a no penalty, low penalty, high penalty scale when equipping vanilla plates on heavy, medium or light frames (respectively). In hindsight, HP Modules penalties would've probably been a better fix for Assault Lite than kneecapping Scout EWAR.

I thought Rattati wanted a scout-only penalty but couldn't do it so implemented the strafe penalty for all plated suits. It was just hoped that scouts would suffer more from a strafe penalty than other suits.

As it turns out this is wrong. Strafe is useful on all suits and the strafe penalty just makes plates a poor option on anything. Balance-wise this was good for scout balance. Plates on scouts was OP, so nerfing them effectively nerfed scout's ability to fit like an assault, as intended. But served to make the modules poor on other suits too.

Unless I'm wrong and it is a scout-only penalty. I'll try to find out. This uncertainty just highlights a reason why it was a bad idea though, as there is no in-game description of extra strafing penalties. So no way for players to know about it other than finding old forum posts.

I don't want to heavily armour scout suits. I just don't like a rather strange and obscure mechanic like double plate strafe penalties.

Hp mods being % based is never a good idea. Heavies would gain such a huge advantage it would be impossible to kill them if they had logis strapped to them.

I'll try to help find the Dev post.

https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2469069#post2469069

Not 100% certain what ultimately came of this, but the intent to fix uparmored scouts without hurting heavies was made clear. Point remains, if Rattati was successful in applying a frame-specific penalty, he could do the "inverse" and lessen plate penalties for heavies. If tinkering with plates is on the table, adding some form of drawback to stacking ferroscale would be nice.

Not necessarily. I'm not saying it would be balanced if that was all you changed. But you could look at tweaking some base hp values and other things and come up with a balanced solution. Plenty of posts in this thread are asking for more survivability for sentinels.

Also, imagine if scouts could be balanced in a way where they didn't need any hp mods. At the moment they need the relatively large percentage increase that hp mods provide, after the essential speed and stealth. Alternatively scouts could have slightly higher base hp?

For reference, say complex shield extenders gave +15% shield hp. Assuming base hp remained the same, this would be:

+98 shields on a sentinel
+52 shields on an assault
+24 shields on a scout

As a bonus, this would really encourage racial tanking styles. Which is something the CPM have specifically been looking into.

Obviously this would be a nerf for scouts, so something would have to be looked at for balance.

https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2469069#post2469069

Not 100% certain what ultimately came of this, but the intent to fix uparmored scouts without hurting heavies was made clear. Point remains, if Rattati was successful in applying a frame-specific penalty, he could do the "inverse" and lessen plate penalties for heavies. If tinkering with plates is on the table, adding some form of drawback to stacking ferroscale would be nice.

Hotfix echo
I've found it.

You will see that where it says strafe penalty on plate is doubled, the bit that says "on scouts" is crossed out. Implying the strafe penalty is on all suits.

Sure enough! Never noticed that! Great catch, Varoth. I now believe you're right, though I would point out that the four months passed between the Nov 2014 thread (above) and HF Echo in March of 2015. Could be that we're dealing with two distinct sets of changes, though that seems less likely that what you've described.

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Assuming you're correct, here's another approach. Do you think the wiring is in place to restrict modules by frame type? If it can be done for Heavy Weapons, couldn't the same be done for "Heavy Plates"?

Just do it the same way you do cloaks tbh. Big fitting cost, big fitting reduction skill built-in.