If people repeat it often enough, it must make it true.

I think we can all agree... that any buff to armor plates will affect both shield tankers and armor tanker equally. Any changes to armor past the introduction of these new plates will need to be in the forms of racial bonuses to armor tankers.

Gallente needs a racial bonus to decrease the speed penalty on plates. Somewhere around 10-15% per level.

Amarr should have a passive armor rep bonus instead of armor rep efficacy, and then their base movement speed brought up to the same level as Gallente and Caldari. This gives Amarr the flexibility to be a slower moving, but high EHP tanks. With only three low slots, they are kind of boned choosing between reps and armor plates atm.

Everyone is pushing for shield extenders to increase dropsuit profile, and I can't argue with that. If it increases hitbox though, anything more than 1-2% per extender, than shield tanking becomes pointless. Hitboxes are dramatically different in eve, and that will not translate well to dust.

Finally, we need to normalize the speed penalty on armor plates. Have all standard plates be ~6% and all reactive plates be ~3%. Higher level modules should not have more of a penalty than low level modules. Same goes for shield extenders, have a 5-15% profile increase per shield extender, regardless of level.

Caldari scouts will then need a racial bonus to decrease profile penalty on shield extenders by 10-15% as well.

Logistics should not have base armor reps, its too powerful. Logis have enough low slots in any race to fit a complex armor rep just fine, except for amarr, which will have base armor reps from their racial.

Overall... what im saying here is that the racial bonuses for all suits in this game need to be reevaluated. In a lot of cases, they are just downright bad.

One concern I've had with armor taking, one that i have yet to see addressed in this thread, is the effective uptime of each tanking system.

If you take a shield tanked suit, and an armor tanked suit, and apply some fixed amount of damage to them, they are both in a 'vulnerable' state and will seek cover. However, the shield tanked suit will regen far faster, bringing it out of its vulnerable state far quicker than the armor suit.

Because of the 'high buffer, low reps' pattern armor has, it just picks up another penalty of having to spend longer getting back up to full strength, or be forced into combat at less than full strength.

I'm curious to see what people think about this gap (i think it more important than any ehp or repping disparity myself). I don't see the new modules helping in this respect.

I actually don't see the new modules fixing any problems. They are directly competing with the existing modules(why?), and the only benefit i see them having is putting buffer and repair on a single module, so a saving in low slots. This helps those with restricted numbers of low slots... so um, shield tankers?

I honestly feel like we should be working on balancing the modules we have, and only add new modules when we have a clearly defined NEED to fill.