Before you read this I am not saying I want to buff or nerf a HA, just make it more realistic. So whats the deal..

right now when our beloved tincans walk they walk slower yes.. Does that mean every movement is slower?
If you are in a (pneumatic?) suit do you walk because of the suit or despite of it?

If the suits 'power' helps you move.. Shouldn't your walk and any other movement be faster. Then again, if you move despite of the suit, so you move even if its so heavy and dragging you down, don't you move slower? Shouldn't every movement be slower?

So the first qestion is.. what should it be.. slowing down, or moving faster? What would a tincan make you do.

My idea (if balance would be possible) is to put this in every movement (as much as possible) of our HAs. So for instance, move slower, reload slower, knife slower, jump slower.. If its faster, it all is faster.

If the idea is 'liked' we can start to see how to balance this I'd say?

Yeah, I like your approach.

Imho everything should be slower like movement speed.
It's heavy armor and loss of speed is the tradeoff, otherwise you have to get jetpack.

I guess there is no way to slower reload or it isn't worth the work,
but I'd like to see changing weapons taking a little longer.
This would demand a little more coordination from HA groups, because you loose time when you switch between welding and shooting while rather constantly being attacked.
At the moment you can easily weld between hit and run attacks, but with that change you probably have to assign 1-2 welder guys, which keep welding while covered to keep those seconds of doing damage, which you will loose otherwise, if everyone pulls out welder and gun again and again.

changing HA in that mannor is really unessecary.

one of the great things about video games is that they arent realistic. it is alot better to have an unrealistic feature that is balanced than an unbalanced realistic feature.

HAs dont walk slower than lights(if they do it is a very minimal amount), i cant notice any difference. the difference in movement you are noticing probably comes from having 250 hmg ammo(slow) as a heavy opposed to 100 lmg ammo(fast) as a light.

I recall seeing that HA walked at 95% the speed of LA.

I agree that balance comes first here, and it could always be motivated with nanites the armor supporting itself mostly.

I like the idea of slowing down every movement because you've got a huge heavy suit on you so it would defiantly limit your range of motion, flexibility and increase the amount of strength needed to perform an action.

I doubt speeding up the heavies would really be a good thing game play wise because it would perform more like a JP and would probably become overpowered.

And tours, I can agree with you that you can make up things in video games but there are things like big, heavy, loud foot step things that give the impression that it's moving slow (at least the eye and the brain would percept that). A JP going slower than a Heavy would be quite odd in my opinion, unless there is a visible reason why. Even a HA with HMG/welder going the same speed as a light would even be odd too, to a lesser extent. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that its all about if it "feels" right or not.

/ramble