I agree that we shouldn't be jumping to conclusions about balance at this stage.
That being said I completely disagree with you when it comes to the question of who to ask about balance.
Asking some elitist clan for their opinion about weapon X is just as silly as asking a "filthy casual" about weapon Y, everyone has his/her favourite weapons and weapons that he/she hates. The main source of information for balancing weapons is - and must remain - statistics.
How many people equip weapon X? How many kills are achieved with weapon X per life? How does weapon X compare to weapon Y if they're in the same category?

Only once the need for balancing a weapon or a class or whatever is established should the community be consulted on HOW to do it. And once that stage is reached, picking randomly selected players to complete a survey will certainly lead to less bias than asking elitist competitive players OR vocal forumites.

Edit: typo

I agree entirely that statistics should be looked at and nowhere did I suggest otherwise but the question of how accurate those statistics are to live combat and gameplay should be raised to said clans first and foremost and the most weight should definitely be given to people who make it their "occupation" to play and enjoy the game, the ones with a vested interest more often than not choose to keep everything as fair as possible and even go so far as to test weapons for multiple hours to confirm whether or not statistics match live tests.

The community as a whole I.E, random player number 2851 with 60 hours played, should only be consulted last; if a large portion of the player-base does complain then do something about it but never compromise on the original idea of a weapon everything should have an intended purpose and should fulfill at least one role to perfection, compromising on that is how you begin the slippery slope into an unbalanced game.

Bias is unavoidable whether it be random player #4817 or a competitive group, the latter is usually more invested and has more interest in keeping the game fair and balanced, which is exactly why I listed clans from three different factions who were responsible for making extensive guides for their respective factions and offering large insight into how weapons worked and the most efficient ways to utilize said weapons for the rest of the community, you can argue that this is very much one-sided and that means certain weapons will tailored to certain play-styles and nothing else but that is exactly how you create a balanced and competitive, fun and fair game, everything should have a purpose and a role it excels at but other things that it is ineffective or at least somewhat inferior to other choices in.

As usual, to each their own but after having played MMOs from WoW to Star Wars Galaxies to Planetside 1, every single time that the vocal minority is allowed to request a rework of equipment or weaponry, it is usually to the detriment of the competitive gameplay.

i remember many games with spawn timer. But i can't remember a reason to not use it. maybe can be a problem with rhino when an entire squad can spawn in front of a camper?

but i can't find any negative when the apawn happen in a safe spawn point

dev listen to hardcore vetetan players= "Q_Q dev listen to vocal minority game is now terrible"

dev listen to large audience= "Q_Q the game is become casual and now is terrible i quit"

dev take a different direction = "Q_Q dev don't listen to players now the game is terrible"

the fact is that if a game have 1 millions of players there is 3 millions of armchairs game designers that know exactly the best possible change for improve the game make everyone happy and bring the peace in the world (1 million of player + 2 millions of people on various site that comment on foru/newsite but never played the game)

Well. We haven't tested anything yet and don't actually know how it all feels, but just by looking at this:

at 0:18 in the video.
I get an impression that assaults got their hands on Warp Spider tech... dashing (more like teleporting) 10-15 meters like that is a bit . . . too much. . . That's kinda the only real issue I see with them now. Other stuff like stun, dmg, how far they can fly etc... It's for the testing in big battles (and yes, it will probably get nerfed... I can kinda already see how full of assaults the sky will be as soon as people get over the first steps of controlling the class).

I agree here. After playing SM for hundreds of hours and getting to know the "pro-part of the community" (on PC) I noticed a tendency for quite skilled people to see the balancing issues only from the point of view with the focus on their favorite weapon, without really knowing that themselves.

In the end it is of course for the devs to set the goals on how a certain weapon should be used and how it should feel. They should listen to the "elite/competitive/w.e. you call it" part of community just as much as other ones, but at the same time they have/should have in mind that a lot of them sometimes have only "please buff my weapon" in mind.

I can agree on the latter point but you've got to bear in mind that Space Marine is a dead game from a development standpoint and has been for about 2 years coupled with terrible netcode & P2P servers, the community less than 100 active players at the moment, as a result there haven't been any balance changes for a lot of the overpowered kit still left in the game, and as a result most of the "professional" or "competitive" players left in the game aren't really either of those, you've only really got people who use overpowered kit to claim victory left, similar to the players who called themselves "professional" at using the BFRs in Planetside 1, no skill or competitive fairness in using a weapon that blows everything else out of the water.

I disagree with calling those people professional or competitive players however, I look to gaming groups like The Enclave(TE) or Angels of Death(AoD) for competitive/professional clans, large scale clans that become intimately familiar with every game they play to learn its mechanics and equipment, kit themselves out accordingly and test other equipment to make sure they stay on top but at the same time, they offer full guides to their members and the public community on how to use certain weapons, things that they think should be changed from their playtesting and various other bits of information that come from playing the games they do for thousands of hours.

Really, at the end of the day though, anyone who makes a good enough argument for a buff or a nerf should be given the time of day but I'm seriously fearful Behaviour might not have the mindset to basically ignore half of the forum who will post nothing but "Nerf X because Y!".

It's always easier to scream "nerf that" before thinking about that oneself was using the weapon wrong or in the wrong context.
Therefore, we should have a rough road map for each weapon what the devs have in mind and how it should theoretically be used in-game against which units, distance, etc. Basically what it should do in 40k lore, but there is a level of interpretation which we should know before...kind of a list from the devs stating the name of the weapon with its intended damage output, range, damage area, most effective target, etc.
So that we can test if it fulfills its purpose, fails it's purpose, is exploitable in a certain way or is better at another thing which should have been covered by another weapon.
If devs and players are on the same page and something is amiss then first check if you used it right or in the enemies case countered it correctly, then and only then it should be considered to undergo "nerfing".

I expect to see a lot of changes in all classes and weapons...I would have been surprised if everything will be perfect from the start. After finding all the bugs in the core mechanics and determining the specs for the servers and clients in closed alpha this "nerfing" will be probably go on until late beta (because you can test the game best if you don't have game-breaking bugs and higher player caps on the server).

Well. I don't think I was talking about SM at the current moment either, since I stopped playing it some months ago. The closer EC comes, the lesser SM playerbase probably becomes. If one were to check the steam chart flow, you'd see that there's at the very least 200 other players you haven't even met. But yeah, the number of players who I'd see as "competitive" could be counted on a couple of hands, probably even just one. And no, I'd never count people who only run with plasma cannons, las-cannons, etc as "competitive"/"professional". Nor do I count players who just abuse bad net-code with their low upload speed as "competitive". Guess it's my own fault for not pointing something like that out in the first comment. Sorry about that.

Well. "Nerf X because Y!" would actually be fine as long as there's a proper reason in that Y.

Well THAT's the thing which made me stop playing SM after the playerbase was split and killed by the DLCs. This "problem" came up more and more as it was not diluted by thousands of players! There was a time were you could play this game competitive and more or less on fair terms! It was a great fun one of my best invested 300h game hours. But then more and more clans were coming, all of them had just a single Ping bar in the red extreme and their lag shadows were making ribbons out of you while you were chasing ghosts. Bloody bastards!
Thank you sir for that information Now I can blame the bad net-code and these people for abusing this and killing one of my favorite games. Did I call these guys bastards already? These Baaaaaastards.....sorry

I'm not sure how much of that lagging was due to genuine ping-manipulation and how much was caused by simply playing from different continents. It was bloody annoying though.