Top 10 Reasons to NOT be a Soldier
Top 10 Reasons to NOT be a Soldier
Bioware announced after ME2 that over 80% of playthroughs were done with the Soldier class. I understand that some people like being a Soldier, so take no offense, but observe my top 10 reasons why NOT to do so:
1. Soldier is for Timmies. This has been made crystal clear with the MP demo the past few weeks. Although I will admit the MP demo has caused a lot of people to branch out and try other classes.
2. Biotics and Tech Powers. If you are playing as a Soldier, you don't have them. Plain and simple. These special powers are what make the Mass Effect series stand apart from other shooters.
3. Vanguard. My personal favorite class, and with good reason. Nothing is more fun than charging a group of enemies, blasting through them with your shotgun, telling your squadmates to snipe a few while you cooldown, then shooting the frontline soldiers in the back.
4. Crouching behind cover is boring. If you are playing as a Soldier, you are doing a lot of cover crouching. Compare that to almost no crouching for a Vanguard, having distractions/shields/invisibility for other classes, and the Soldier seems pale in comparison.
5. Concussive Shot Sucks. Yes, yes it does.
6. Cooldown for squadmates is slow. If you play as a Soldier, you must rely on teammates for the biotic and tech powers...and squad mates take a helluva lot longer to cooldown those abilities than Shepard does, which means they aren't being used nearly as often.
7. No floating enemies, enemies stuck in Stasis, soldiers flying off ledges, and other LOL moments. When you're playing as an Adept, Engineer, or Vanguard, you get a ton of these moments. Enemies turning on each other due to AI Hacking or Dominate, charging an enemy off a ledge, launching people in the air, it literally makes me laugh out loud.
8. Not Infiltrator. Seriously, if you're going to be a sniper, and you must because you have a sniper rifle...you are going to benefit from using Tactical Cloak. But, you don't have it because you're a Soldier. Last time I looked, you get a 75% bonus to damage caused while cloaked. The Infiltrator is going to be vital to MP games as well, since he can hack devices and sneak behind enemy lines to revive fallen comrades.
9. Five Guns? Big deal. Let's see you use all 5 guns at once, Mr. Big Shot. The game doesn't let you dual-wield, so I'm not sure what the advantage is to having all the guns. Not to mention you're probably not going to be using the SMG if you have the assault rifle, and you won't use the pistol if you have the shotgun and sniper rifle. But hey, maybe you will. And maybe you're compensating for something, I dunno.
10. Everybody else is doing it. Maybe I'm a freak, but I don't like doing what everyone else is doing. If 80% of players are Soldier, I don't wanna.
I don't disagree. I will point out though, most of your comments are in regard to MP.
In the SP, Soldier can be fun because of what your squad can do - I played a soldier first in both of my ME1 characters, and having Liara toss dudes in the air for me and Tali to kill was just as awesome as playing as an Adept in ME2 and throwing them in the air myself.
That being said, I can understand why it would suck in MP. It's much more fun to have powers there.
No, these are mostly in regard to SP. Number 6 is the biggest reason for this. Squad powers are too slow to cooldown, especially on the harder difficulties. They did that on purpose so Shepard would be the most powerful one on the squad. But I will agree your strategy sounds pretty sweet. Unfortunately, on Hardcore or Insanity, you won't be tossing many dudes around with biotics. You spend way more time whittling down barriers/armors/shields.
In contrast to this, I have really enjoyed having a Soldier in the MP demo, or being one myself. Keep in mind that in the demo, everyone's powers can have amazing cooldown if they carry a limited number of weapons. In ME3, the Soldier has Carnage, which could negate nearly everything I said in the OP. heh
I used to play the soldier quite a bit just cause I wasn't big on the biotics thing.
That being said, the MP demo has forced me to play other classes just to survive. It's no fun playing a soldier when you spend most of your time being revived by teammates who need to be using their time weilding biotics.
Because of this I quite enjoy playing the other classes now. My current favs are Engineer and Vanguard.
well atleast in example #2 you call the game what it is, a shooter. instead of what everyones likes to pretend it to be, a rpg.
I dunno man, soldier is pretty sweet. Most of the enemies on veteran and above start having armor and barriers more often than not which is gonna make most of the tech and biotic powers useless. Being able to use adrenaline rush plus a variety of ammo powers lets you take those down quick. Then once they're on health, you can usually kill em before a lift or stasis would do any good.
And I would say vanguard is the timmy class. :p Which is the one that runs out into the group of enemies and gets killed more often?
this.
LOL. And I LOVE the Vanguard class in MP because it is fricking ridiculously easy to play. Thats the class I use when I am drunk as fuck, and big surprise I can still do awesome with it. If I were to use an Infiltrator at that level of intoxication the results are horrible.
That being said after having an Adept ranked up with Stasis and a high level Carnifex, the Vanguard seems lame
I like playing as them all in both ME1 and ME2. They all have their own spin which is fun to make the game different.
Favorite: Adept
Least Fav: Sentinel
Solider is more the FPS playing in my mind. You don't want all the flashy powers and stuff, you just want to kill.
Vanguard, you want to kill, but you want to do it with style.
Adept, you want to cause havoc without a weapon
Sentinel, Kaidan is a Sentinel enough said.
Infiltrator, you want to pick them off with an awesome sniper rifle
Engineer, you want to talk to Tali more. (though I have enjoyed the engineer in the mp demo)
Yeah, that sentinel is kind of a crap class in the MP. Even maxed out that tech armor doesn't prevent a lot of damage, still wind up needing to sit behind a wall. And if you use the armor it kills the recharge on your other powers.
The only good thing to do with it is to blow it up and send the wave out to knock back guardians. Other than that, it is useless.
Yeah, I totally have no desire for hardcore or insanity at all
I really loved the Adept, but it was hard dealing with folks with shields unless I had a squadmate with overload. That's why I never got the "survive five levels of object rho" achievo from the Arrival DLC - i always got killed solo by the heavy mech. I'd hit it with my Cain, it's disappear, then the doors would open and it's walk right back out towards me, unscathed. Anyway...
I can't wait to play with a few more in ME3 and then do a full playthrough 1 - 3. It's the decisions that'll really show the differences too
Vanguard is a more skill based class. Frankly, anyone who uses Vanguard is probably going to die more often than other classes because it's a tougher class to play. That's why I like it. If you are finding Vanguard to be too easy, it's time to up the difficulty. See how well you do against an Atlas, Turret, or Brute while charging into the action.
Great thing about RPGs is you can play how you want. Soldier is not something I got into a whole lot in the first two games, but with the changes they've made I can see myself playing Soldier more in ME3.
Maybe we have differing opinions on what TImmies do. When I think of Timmies, I think of the pussy sitting back in a corner, camping and sniping, (improving K/D ratio) not the guys running into the middle of the battle to make a difference for their team.
Agree with you. I never felt I could fairly judge a class in ME2 until I was able to beat insanity with it. Only then could I tell how well I really understood how it works.
Admittedly, I still have not yet made an insanity run with my Vanguard on ME2. But still I plan to do one in an effort to really learn it well before I carry him through to ME3. I dug the playstyle, but it definitely had the highest learning curve, and I just never put in enough time to master it at the level I wanted to.
Never did take my Infitrator through insanity either, but I was never as big a fan of the class. I sacrificed him in a deliberate "fail playthrough" just to see how the game plays out when everyone dies in the end, so he's not even available to carry over. I'll eventually roll up a new one and see if I change my mind about it in ME3.
My Adept has always been my favorite, and I even learned to love the Sentinel in ME2 thanks to Tech Armor. But I never hate on the Soldier. It's always been fun to me.
I think of the human Vanguards I played with last week that kept charging into my lined up sniper shots, getting downed left and right, and wondering why no one is reviving them. MAYBE BECAUSE YOU ARE ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE MAP AND ARE SWARMED WITH ENEMIES AT THE START OF A ROUND?!?!?
I turned my maleshep soldier into a vanguard last night for ME3, since I hadn't tried that class yet.
I'll admit, my learning curve was a little steep to start, since I'm playing on the default difficulty and I definitely got toasted a few times thinking that I was on the last guy, hitting Y for a charge, and then being overwhelmed by the next wave of enemies. I'm only carrying 2 weapons so my recharge is pretty high, but I couldnt get my Nova off enough times to survive.
I'm really digging it, I just ned to be better about when to use the powers. Also helps that I started at level 30 ;-)
Maybe I am misreading this but... Sir you may be using nOvA wrong. I haven't tried it on campaign but during the mp demo, nova is not a standard power. It does not share a cooldown or related to the other powers. It uses your shields to power it. If your sheilds are week it will be weak, if they are strong, then strong nova, and most frightening of all, if you have no sheilds then you can not perform a nova.
The trick with nova is having biotic charge built up enough that you can have the power restore shields. Have nova built up so that it uses half sheild power, then you charge in, nova twice, cooldowns will be done, then biotic charge again to power up shields. Its basically too easy once you built up those 2 powers enough. You may get a little bored that way though as your battles will start to feel extremely repetitive and easy.
Yeah sounds like Nova is being used incorrectly. I like to run into a crowd and use Nova, then immediately charge the one that's furthest away. Then turn and hit the others in the back. Finish off anyone still standing with melee, then repeat.
It sounds repetitive and easy, but it's very fun and challenging. Also, one thing that has helped me is making sure I bring squad mates with sniper rifles and show-stopping powers like Carnage or Stasis. That way, if I get in a jam, I can use my mates to freeze the action or obliterate someone who's about to take me out.
I also recommend using Cryo ammo as a Vanguard. If done right, you can literally hide behind frozen enemies while your Charge is in cooldown.
Yeah I was rocking the fire ammo last night, I'll switch to Cryo.
And yeah, I totally ahd it backward - was charging the group, hitting the guy with shields, then going for the Nova. I'll try to reverse, since it makes WAY more sense to use the charge to get out of dodge. I'm just too used to the Adept I just ran through ME2 last week
I feel like the Soldier class is for people who want to play the same familiar role game to game and don't want to branch out and really explore what the different classes offer. Can't decide, too confusing with all this powers shit? OK here's a solider for you.
I dunno, soldier is a good class to get to play with some weapons you wouldn't use otherwise. Something like the geth plasma shotgun weighs a TON, wouldn't be appropriate for an adept to use.
Unless you were talking about the campaign, then I totally agree. That's just boring.
I'm a shooter fan so I choose the soldier route the most even though I've done multiple playthroughs with different classes. It makes sense though, as my favorite RPG's have shooting elements to them: Mass Effect series, Fallout series, etc. I'm not a fan of magic/spells/biotics. Contrary to many people here, I've had more fun going the soldier route than others. Personal preference I assume.
I always do multiple playthroughs including one playthrough with each class. So I get to experience what each class has to offer. I believe my very first Shepard in ME1 was a Soldier, but after I played the other classes, I found the Soldier to be pretty one dimensional. Especially in ME1, you could just spam Immunity and never die, never even had to take cover.
Truth be told, I'm looking forward to my soldier playthrough in ME3 so I can try out all the weapons and not even worry about cooldown times.