Agree on all points there, I'm a touch concerned, thought I do have faith in the GC's to playtest the fuuuuudge out of the game.
My concerns are partially abated with the stamina slowdown we saw.
Now, let's use the Reem v Ngannou clip we got as a reference.
In the beta system, they would have swung at that speed for all 3-5 rounds, which is utterly insane as they were really quite quick for HWs. Any fights past round 1 would have looked jarring.
But with that said, the speed the heavyweights threw at didn't look all that dissimilar to the LWs, I was rewatching one of my Barboza fights earlier, and Reems step in leg kick isn't that much slower to be honest. I haven't watched them side by side or anything.
I guess when I see the HWs I do immediately associate them with the UFC 2 cumbersome HW's, UD3's heavyweights were quick as Hell as well.
Like you said, I just hope they all feel different.
HW's do look POWERFUL, like, I assume that footage was a normal match, one clean counter ended the fight. As it should.
If their max stamina drops VERY quickly on whiffs, large output, and they become quite cumbersome when slow ill be pretty happy.
As for stat caps. That we will have to wait and see.
It didnt work that well in UD3 to be honest, if you did the openweight glitch then a 85ish Speed stat HW is the exact same speed as a 85 speed stat WW.
If it worked that way in UFC 3, mixed weight fights would an easy way to see it, say there was a LW and a WW with 85 overall striking speed each.
Move levels don't effect speed, so if they throw at the same speed you'd know what rhe cap removal means (kinda wish move levels gave slight speed buffs given there aren't seperated punch kick speeds)
It's all a game of wait and see sadly.
Edit: Perhaps we got the LW's in beta as a kinda balancer in a sense, they're kinda the middle of the 8 men's classes. So if they all kinda feel that bit slower and quicker in each respective lower and higher class ill be pretty happy (I realize this is an oversimplified version of weight differences but you get my point)