So I noticed one thing about soldier that stands out from the other heroes on overbuff in my personal case.
If I play mccree for 30 games and play at the 70th percentile in terms of crits and killing blows and such, I end up at about the 70th percentile in rank.
if I do the same for hanzo, I end up at roughly where I am relative to other hanzos.
However, if I play soldier, I can have top 1% of soldiers in terms of accuracy, damage, killing blows, missiles, ult kills. But it doesn’t translate into wins. I think it’s cause I have to reload too much. If I play mccree, I find that if I am significantly better than my opponents, I can kill 3 in the space of 2 secs. But soldier is always limited by his ammo and his reload time. Even if you have the aim of a god, you don’t have the same skill ceiling that a mccree or widowmaker does.
So I wanted to suggest something from paladins. I’ve played viktor (the equivalent of soldier a lot in paladins), and his carry ability is way way way better than soldiers because of one particular talent.
Ammo on kill and assist. I really think that just giving soldier this one buff would move into viability in the upper tiers of play. I think I was wrong when i thought that his TTK was too high to be played at top tiers, I think that’s not the issue. I think the wasted time makes him useless. I feel like even if he kills one opposing dps, if the other dps is a doomfist or widow, they could easily kill 2 in the same time. But if he was rewarded for getting a kill with more ammo, I could easily see him being able to put out similar output.
Anyway this is just my thought. I played some paladins lately and viktor is just a soooo much better character than soldier. It’s also significantly more fun to play because you end up in situations where you will die if you do not get the first kill to get the ammo reset.
I don’t think we, the competitive players, are thinking in a way “In other game, it is done better”. We play this game and express our feelings what is strong, weak, fun, boring and so on.
I don’t mind your idea but it doesn’t solve any problem. It’s just like “I like it how it’s done in other game”.
soldier needs a buff, but no one listens and instead blizzard claims, soldier win rate is ok in Gm because some GM players feel like playing soldier and play it in the games their team is already going to win. but if you watch streamers you notice that they swap off of soldier in like 10 sec whenever their team is struggling.
And you never see them swap from something else to soldier that is for certain.
And then yesterday we got to see what a joke soldier is first hand in OW league. he managed to get maybe 100 damage…he was outwalked because reaper walked toward him, so he gave up high ground…he then hid on the low ground unable to hit anything and watched as his team died, and then swapped off. It was no different than watching a gold soldier except the gold soldier wouldn’t have given up high ground and would have just died.
what does it take for soldier to get a buff around here. he is a fun to play character, but he’s honestly worse than torb or sym. if you look at OW performance and just consider the number of times a pick has worked out, sym and torb both have outperformed soldier
So, what, because streamers are doing something, they have to be right and I am not a streamer, hence I am “no one” and I cannot possibly have my own opinion which doesn’t completely agree with theirs?
Solider is far from being at bad position.
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Ummmm… did u ever play ashe? Plus soldier is really strong atm he just isnt fun for most ppl to play.
I would even go one step ahead.
Give him ammo back on misses (inspiration from Destiny’s “Super Good Advice” machine-gun that way he can shoot shields without reloading and kill about… 2 people with only bodyshots so 3 people with normal aim. His 1v1 wouldn’t drastically change but his shieldbreak would be a nice middle ground between McCree and Bastion (right now it’s the same as McCree’s).
That’s still more balanced than killing all 6 without reloading btw.
They just need to remove soldiers spread. Rng in aim is bad for the game. Firing ten shots and stopping to fire again just makes him weaker.
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i like soldier very much. i think he could just use some sort of additional utility. maybe a smoke grenade or a flashbang that blinds you. at least this would be fitting the character.
or let him switch (like lucio) between bullet types: armor piercing or hollowpoint bullets. maybe with a forced reload in between.
76 can’t be strong because he’s a jack of all trades. Tip him any one way and he’ll be too strong a hero overall. That’s what happens when you have overblown kits. Hero balancing would be easier with one ability, a passive, and an ult for every character.
let’s look at how much value a pro playing soldier gets.
he opens the map by shooting at the enemy dive onto his point. he hits a good percentage of his shots and manages to get genji from 200 down to 100 hp. he has gotten 12% ult. Enemy genji already at 40 percent ult charge.
so while sitting back where he is safe at his optimal range, he is not even successfully managing to get ult, much less any chance of getting kills. the probability of getting a solo kill from back there is almost zero. But that is the only range soldier can be played from safely.
reaper goes high ground, so soldier drops to bottom doing nothing. soldier retreats, he gets to poke a little bit more, getting another 5-10% ult charge.
enemy genji almost at blade, yet all he has managed to do is sit and be useless. He now has no angles to the point. Enemy team fights and wipes his team because his team is down a dps.
Because having a soldier on your team in this game is basically the same as being 5v6. what a joke. this isn’t even the first time i’ve posted about how soldier gets 0 value even in a pro game. It was exactly the same last year. Does anyone remember how fast that team that tried to run soldier on volskaya A got wiped? or how stupid the soldier looked up top, having completely free damage because the enemy didn’t think he was relevant so that he basically got trash damage on the enemy for 30-40 sec and finishes charging ult as his team’s last 2 players dies. Of course he swaps off immediately because no one on the team would dream of thinking that soldier ult could make a useless soldier get value. OW league teams keep playing soldier every 6 months so that characters seem good and they can pretend that more than 3-4 dps are useful, but each time the soldier gets wiped without a single kill and swaps off. So far in OW league videos I’ve seen soldier get value 0 times for 3 games, but according to Jeff and the forums soldier is in a good place.
At least korean players are more realistic. you play soldier on the korean server they yell at you for throwing
edit: I should add that by “get value,” i actually mean do at least 1/3 of a person’s work. I have yet to see a single soldier manage to get even 2 kills while playing 4 min on a point. If someone really wants to argue that soldier is not a troll, maybe they should try to take the challenge and actually find a video with that. Plenty of teams have tried running soldier. None of them have failed to regret it
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I already read your opinion on why Soldier’s win rate is decent in GM. What about master and diamond where it’s in the top 10 of all heroes? What about plat where it’s 11th?
To me it seems like his win rate is perfectly fine in any rank where people can aim. He may not be brilliant at the pro level, but on ladder he’s fine.
I just want to see soldier get 3 kills once on a pro stage. But it’s never going to happen
And again the discussion about winrate.
Winrate barely matters without pickrate.
Legit the only hero worse than soldier is sombra, except she has a niche where emp can be really good in the likes of 2 cp or hack to cripple doom/hack health packs to cripple tracer.
I have a couple hundred hours playing soldier on this account and reaching gm on it. I have a soldier onetrick acc where I reached 4.3k in S17.
Yet start of 2-2-2 he became less than useless, at least before RQ there was so much chaos that you could win because of chaos and winning 1v1s.
Today my soldier onetrick sits at like 3.3k and I am doing way better playing literally any other hero, even though my soldier is objectively better than anything else (For example with doom I still have literally no idea what I am doing, rocket punching into 6 people, not getting kills with his slam uppercut, etc…, yet I can play doom just fine in low master)
Its not that soldier isnt fun (most games where the win is already secure someone goes soldier for fun), its that you wont have any fun playing soldier, only running away from threats (which is nearly the whole cast atm.) And on top of that getting flamed LITERALLY every single game. You can have 0 deaths, be the only one getting picks at the start of a fight, having most dmg, etc… and people will flame you for dying every fight and not killing anything because you play soldier.
Oh jeah, soldier onetrick acc was once banned for gameplay sabotage.
Pro play is different to ladder. When was the last time you saw someone ragequit from an OWL match?
you forgot that comp is entirely different from practiced team play. in regular comp you can still carry as soldier. just bc someones playrate is low he is not bad
Honestly I think something Soldier desperately needs is for him to be able to use all his non-shooting abilities while sprinting i.e. reloading and placing heal. And while we’re at it, let him sprint backwards.