Hmg is a minmatar weapon, in dust at least minmatar is known for short range breaching or long distance suppression/area denial! I believe the hmg needs a much longer effective to fit this bill somewhere along the lines of 80-100m effective, enough to really scare an enemy into hunkering down! But as I said this an amarr suit which are always better for longer ranges, which a minmatar weapon doesn't allow!

Its not an ideal situation at the moment, but when they are released I imagine suits will complement their weapons better!
Saying that I have seen interesting and effective heavy squads before!

One use a dropship dropped dirrectly onto the point and locked it down was pure genius, and ill never forget my teamates response as a heavy landed 30 cm from him!

Bo***ks

as a proto heavy in my main i have little problem going ham if i run with my sqd i can easily go 10+ kills/ 3- deaths
and as for attacking the objective vs defending one my sqd style caters to the heavy as we are the slowest (defend order on me and sqd forms around me then we move as one slow unified group into the bulkhead of radish scurge and when we get to the front line i take point til i get low armor then fall back and let me sqd finnish up ...all with hmg basic (prof 5)

Thing is you could prob do better with a different weapon....

you are simply doing it wrong.

-a brick tanked logi is as slow as a heavy, so whatever you think the problem with your movement is, the amarr and gallente logis have the same issue.
-a heavy can move right in your face in a LAV on all maps
-a heavy does not even have to get an LAV in certain complexes

If you make heavies capable of easily taking on multiple opponents, what you will end up with in matches is 5 heavies surrounding an objective being absolutely untouchable. It's a pretty good tactic already, especially with the inside objectives like the underground one in the Research Facility.

Someone said my name?

OP, I just described my personal playstyle with the heavy, obviously it's a naturally slower, more armoured dropsuit than the assault. Therefore one of its roles can be circling the point rather than head on assault.

I can envision so many battle tactics using them though that I don't think we have shoehorned the heavy into a single role.

I have seen 2 LLAVS with 3 heavies blast past footslogging old me, with me showing on the point 30 seconds after a brutal slaughter and heavies roaming the perimeter, similar to assault terminators from W40k. The commando is definitely a role that we want to expand on in that regard.

Similarly with dropships deployment, maybe even remote repping the heavies.

Then we have the missing racials, I play Gallente Assault and it's much different from Caldari. I can only presume that the heavy differences will be similar.

So, what you're basically saying is "heavies should just HTFU and wait for all racial heavy dropsuits and weapons to come out"?

I mean, that would be fine if "The Event" is about to happen anytime soon. I'm probably just wild-guessing here, but judging from all the buzz on the forums (and datadump mining), next weapons to be released are in the light/sidearm category - as if they aren't overpopulated already (compared to heavy arsenal at least). This means that heavies probably won't be getting any love in the next few months.

You do realize that current game balance is already biased toward medium dropsuits? This is a problem. It eliminates options. Fewer options means less variety. Less variety means less fun. Less fun means fewer people playing the game. Surely, this isn't what CCP is aiming for.