TL;DR: Soldier could use some love from the devs!
He is technically stronger than he has ever been before, thanks to all the buffs he’s been getting. And yet he feels weaker than most other dps alternatives, and sees little play in the hands of pros (both in OWL and in Masters and above). Even in diamond I don’t see a lot of soldiers other than myself. A lot of people think he has a low skill ceiling, but tracking is a hard skill in and of itself, and can be very difficult when you think about the things you can do with it. Landing 8 to 10 headshots back to back in a short period of time is, in my opinion, just as hard as getting a single headshot as widow. I think both tracking and flicking have infinite skill ceilings, but that’s not the discussion I want to get into.
Right now, it feels like if you want to burst a target down, you either have to get an inhuman amount of headshots in a very short timeframe (which is very hard to do) or you have to get some headshots/bodyshots and then land your helix, which can also be a hard thing to do. If your helix is cooling down, you basically have to have god-like levels of aim to keep getting headshots or else the targets get healed up unless they’re deeply out of position. And I’m just in diamond, so the timeframe to kill someone before the enemy supports heal them up must be even smaller in masters and above.
But aside from that, Soldier also has two rather weak ways of dealing with shields. You either shoot at them and hope your team helps you break the shields before 10 years have passed, or you have to do some super risky flanking. In the current bunker meta, I find myself flanking more and more as soldier to make up for my lack of shield break. Ashe, for example, can at least throw dynamite over a shield to make ult charge. Then she can send in bob when the enemy ana has used her sleep dart. Soldier, on the other hand, either has to do some risky flanks or hope his team picked the right heroes to burst shields.
Soldier also doesn’t feel that much stronger (if at all stronger) than hanzo or widow at mid or short distances. You’d think that a hero like soldier should be able to come out on top vs widow and hanzo at medium ranges, but even at short ranges they seem to either have an edge, or be at equal playing field as soldier. On top of this, they flat out beat soldier at long ranges, and in some ways they have more mobility than soldier too. If snipers are better at long range, what’s soldier better at?
Soldier’s ult is also very difficult to use or get value out of. There are so many things that can easily counter soldier ult that you have to wait for the stars to align before you activate it. Most ults require some conditions to be met before they can be used, but Soldier ult feels like a lot of conditions need to be met. It’s so easy to mess up your timing or positioning with it and get no value.
Finally his healing beacon, while nice, doesn’t work well with most non-bunker teams. It works well with bunker teams a little bit because they are likely to stay on your healing beacon when you put it behind the bunker. But in other games, even if you tell your teammates that you’re putting a healing beacon down on top of them, things happen so fast that they almost never stay on top of it. For the most part, whenever I try to save someone with a healing beacon, no matter what I say over voice comm, they usually leave it because they’re too busy focusing on staying alive.
Look, I don’t think soldier should be a weak hero just because he’s easy to pick up. I think soldier is very hard to master, and I really do think that his skill ceiling for his aim is a lot harder than people realize. Flicking heroes are hard, too, but tracking mobile heads in order to land multiple shots without missing is also hard. If soldier really did have a low skill ceiling, then the aims of people like Dafran (who is considered by many to be one of the most mechanically gifted players) wouldn’t be so inhuman compared to the aims of other soldiers. What pros can do with soldiers can be mesmerizing to watch. Their aim feels like a magnet that refuses to leave a target’s head. I would bet that most people will never be able to reach that level of mechanical prowess. So, I think it’s unfair to say “Soldier is easy to pick up so he should be a weak hero”. I really do think he is hard to master.
At the very least, I think we can all agree that soldier could use a little more love from the developers.