They've talked about giving Gallente (or armor tankers) some bonus to speed penalties on the armor plates before, right? Or was I just imagining it?

I'd assume that would make regular plates more appealing to gallente because they could fit higher hp with no penalty. Maybe Amarr would have some similar but lesser bonus to armor speed penalties? Balancing in context of that might be a little different. I'd want to know if there are other "balance" changes incoming that might impact armor tanking before taking up the sharpie to fix the new modules.

That said, the reactive plates seem really hard to like. I'd think the fitting reqs might be higher (like maybe on the order of standard plate fitting + standard reppers fitting-wise). However, I'd think the penalty on the hp/reps wouldn't be that high. Ferroscale is a bit tougher.

It's difficult to juggle the balance for all this in my head in comparison to shields because suits can fit both modules anyway.

I think a creative shield extender penalty would be a penalty to not only signature radius but increased delay in shield recharge.

The more extenders you shove on yourself the longer it takes to kick back in from damage.

Essentially what it boils down to is that Shield recharge on a Logi is 20 HP/s so after the 6 second delay it starts recharging. Thereby, it will recharge 100 HP in ten seconds. For armor to compete, it has to be able to restore 10 HP/s. This balances them out at 10 seconds, but Shield still maintains superiority in time between gunfire.

Problem with that is that armor repairs even in battle, so if the person is a bad shot, all the shields in the world won't help.

So, we need to buffer armor out so that it's worth having the slow repair. I.e. more HP. If armor tankers are king at absorbing bullets, then the movement penalty is negligible. Unfortunately, most of the issue with shield vs armor tanking revolves around the suits themselves and certain races (Gallente) receive useless ads bonuses.

Bear in mind that certain suits have faster recharge times as well. A level 5 Caldari assault has 31.25 without modules attached.

Just as well another factor is that Shield regulators reduce the time delay, so it's plausible that a Caldari Assault can recharge (with a five second delay as its base) 215 shields in 10 seconds with a single complex regulator that does not take away from its tanking abilities.

Essentially it's not so farfetched as to allow armor tankers to have a -LOT- more HP and retain the movement speed penalty.

well it was just a penalty numbers could get worked out a bit. Then the offset would be to make 'small extenders' that don't stress the rechargers. Also the penalty itself could be a 'multiplier.'

Plus throw in a Shield Refibulator Equipment for Logis to use to kick start a players shields. Getting them back into action faster.

You realize 30 HP is like, one Militia Assault Rifle round, right? It dishes out 12.5 rounds a second. If anything, I'd still say that shield tankers got an advantage.

As an experiment, I threw on 3 Complex Plates on my gallente assault suit to try it out and I can turn fast enough to land shots on Caldari assault suits at <20m. They simply out-strafe my gunfire. -30% isn't worth the 350 extra armor if I can't defend myself.

First of all - don't ever make the assumption that losing a fight means the player isn't good. I didn't assume that...you said you couldn't aim...

Second, it was three complex plates as an experiment. Nothing more, nothing less.

Cars don't start at 0 and go full speed instantly, neither do tanks nor dropships.

Infantry should follow that rule but albitly it should be a relative short gap between starting to run and max speed much much shorter than the LAVs. After all the rule is followed when falling, so it should be applied while starting from crotch to full stride. The most notable for acceleration would be changing direction or stopping (intertia) however this is probably why it was a hated feature in red orchestra is that it probably killed the 'circle dance' strafing. Which is something many real world scenarios don't do because its more of the fact that you can only afford to get hit once so dancing in a circle the open is extremely stupid.

The Heavy suit would be the slowest to get to full speed but this would allow to give the heavy similar speed to the assault suit instead but give it worse acceleration so it takes them longer to get to the same speeds.

and with that going to bed.

Updated the OP.