Soldier

Soldier is generally seen as the jack of all trades, capable of doing solid enough damage against tanks and giant robots, but is particularly efficient at wrecking crowds of robots and cleaning up the trash. He's also important for providing support with his banner of choice, granting an impactful buff to himself and his nearby teammates. While easily applicable to practically any situation in later waves, he struggles in early waves due to his expensive upgrades, which he won't afford all at once on the first wave or two, especially not on Gear Grinder.

Due to the wide selection of available items for Soldier, he tends to be the least consistent in terms of effectiveness, and depending on one's playstyle and loadout choice he can either be a team leading powerhouse or a dead weight who struggles to keep up with his team's Heavy and Engineer.

Common mistakes

I don't care if you're a lone wolf who works alone, MvM is a co-op game and you should do everything you can to help your team. In Soldier's case, helping your team is actually incredibly easy-- just activate your banner near your allies, and resume shooting! Attempting to use any other secondary will massively waste not just your own time, but your team's.

This is covered by the previous point, but deserves particular mention for being incredibly common with new players (it's an epidemic, I swear). By using the parachute, not only do you forgo buffing yourself and your team (why?), you also make it incredibly hard to dodge incoming attacks due to how slowly you move while suspended in the air. Sooner or later, you will draw the attention of the robots, and when they start shooting at you, you won't be able to take cover unless you drop your parachute, and chances are you'll be killed before you can touch the ground. What's more, being high up in the air makes it significantly harder to hit direct hits onto small robots than when you're on the ground, and splash-only rockets will do pitiful amounts of damage due to how far away you'd make yourself from them-- that is, unless you're using crits or mini-crits.

But I know what you're thinking: "Oh, but I must use the parachute, because how else am I going to use the Air Strike?" Well, let me explain...

Air Strike: Parachute or no parachute?

Using the Air Strike in general isn't the smartest idea because on top of having to buy full reload speed, firing speed, and damage, you also have to sink credits into clip size to make the most out of the barrage feature that everyone seems to love. But for the sake of argument, let's say that you prepared such a hefty investment and are ready to make the most out of the Air Strike. What does the parachute bring you? Well, the ability to shoot up to sixteen rockets in one big rush. But do you really need these sixteen rockets?

To answer that question, we'll have to individually look at what the Air Strike provides for both single-target and crowd damage.

For crowd damage, as previously stated, your splash damage will be severely harmed by damage fall-off due to the distance you'd be putting yourself at by floating in the air with the Air Strike, and the only way for you to do full damage to small robots is if you have Rocket Specialist (which you need anyway) and by having every rocket be a direct hit. Combining the factors of the awkward aerial angle, the larger than normal distance, the increased firing speed and reduced splash radius while jumping, and your own terrible aim, expecting every rocket to be a direct hit is simply absurd. Furthermore, you'll end up firing way more rockets than necessary to clear out just one clump of robots, causing you to waste more time reloading while the next group behind them further advances. You can, however, circumvent the damage fall-off on splash-only rockets if you have mini-crits or crits-- but using a crit canteen on small robots is excessive, and you can't use mini-crits cause you threw away your Buff Banner for the parachute!

Add it all up, you'll simply do less damage against small robots by floating in the air than by just staying on the ground and individually firing each rocket. Remember that as a Soldier, what you're generally relied upon is to mess up the small robots so that your team doesn't get overwhelmed. By constantly rocket jumping with the parachute and Air Strike, you sabotage this role-- why?

Which leaves us with the second reason one might use the B.A.S.E. Jumper and the Air Strike together-- single-target burst damage. For this one, we'll have to crunch some numbers, are you ready?

I did some testing, and without the parachute, the most rockets you can reliably fire during a single rocket jump is nine rockets-- not counting the first rocket you fire when you touch the ground. If you start firing and adjust your aim faster, or if you jump from an elevated position onto a lower one, you can squeeze out more rockets in that jump.

With four ticks of damage, a direct hit from a single rocket of the Air Strike does this much damage:

Times nine, that's 1399 for non-crits, 1863 for mini-crits, and 4131 for crits. Non-crits and mini-crits will kill Super Scouts (good luck with that), and full crits will kill a giant Soldier. And you don't need a parachute to accomplish that! This isn't even counting the one or few rockets you'll have left in the crit canteen after you've landed! And, be honest, isn't that enough? The only thresholds you're not meeting are against giant Medics and Heavies who have 4500 and 5000 HP respectively, but if you ask me, this isn't such a big deal that it would warrant equipping the parachute-- after all, you can just finish them off with the couple of rockets left in your canteen!. You might ask, in this niche situation, if it'd be worth it to extend your barrage to kill both the giant Medic and his patient, but this doesn't actually work because you wouldn't have enough crit rockets to kill two 4000+ HP giants in one canteen, even with the parachute. Besides, if the name of the game was insantly killing giants, a Demoman with the Scottish Resistance will be a far more popular choice than you, so no sweat, right?

Because nine rockets are enough to kill 4000 HP giants, and one or two extra will be enough to finish off a giant Heavy, this means you can opt to only take one tick of clip size for the Air Strike rather than the pricey four ticks.

This leaves us with the last ditch effort to make the Air Strike & parachute combo viable: tank busting.

By using a crit canteen and firing all 16 rockets into the tank, you will do 7,344 damage. This is a pretty neat number we're looking at, I won't lie. But is this really the be-all, end-all for tankbusting?

Without exhausting all the options for tankbusting, let's compare the price tag of a fully upgraded Air Strike vs the price tag of two other popular options for tankbusting:

The Beggar's Bazooka and the Soda Popper, with one crit canteen, will do 4320 damage, versus the Air Strike's 7344. In either case, you're looking at a significantly cheaper price for tankbusting, and the amount of credits you'll save with this price cut alone will be enough to buy enough crit canteens to feed a village, while it's hard to expect to even be able to afford a fully upgraded Air Strike until the last few waves of a mission. Yes, it is factually true that the Air Strike does more damage here, but let's be real-- the difference it and the listed rivals isn't so massive that it would warrant paying an extra 2400 credits-- especially since tanks aren't that much of a threat in the first place.

So, no. No matter how you slice it, using the Air Strike & parachute combo is not the best way to play Soldier, and you should use a banner instead. Please.

How to use the Beggar's Bazooka

As you might already know, the Beggar's Bazooka is popularly considered Soldier's best primary in MvM, but due to it being unpopular in TF2 PvP most people wouldn't guess as much. Don't be fooled, the advantage of the Bazooka isn't the barrage, but it's the ability to "tap-fire"-- by fully upgrading reload speed, you can mash the fire button instead of holding it down and fire very quickly without needing to upgrade neither clip size nor reload speed, nor having to ever actually reload! The only drawback is that you don't get ammo from dispensers while you're holding it out, but you can easily circumvent this by popping your banner while standing by the dispenser or otherwise just holstering it for a moment. It's worth noting that its inaccuracy will make it inconsistent at long ranges, but Soldier works best at close ranges anyway, and giants are hard to miss even with the random spread of the rockets.

Upgrade priority

Regardless of if you use a regular rocket launcher or slash Soldier's massive price tag with the Beggar's Bazooka, Soldier requires a lot of upgrades to be fully viable to play, meaning that he works best after the first couple of waves. Regardless of primary, the three most important upgrades are, in order, reload speed, Rocket Specialist, and damage. Only take one tick of Rocket Specialist, as the subsequent ticks don't do anything useful, while the first tick slows robots on hit and removes damage fall-off at medium-to-long range. If not using the Bazooka, make sure to take full firing speed, and for non-Bazooka primaries you can take a tick or two of clip size on later waves. Ammo capacity upgrades can be highly valuable on the Bazooka.

Health on Kill will be very helpful throughout the whole game, and on later waves you can be self-sufficient with multiple ticks of Health on Kill and full resistances. Due to his expensive primary, resistances should be taken sparingly, and you should avoid tanking damage in favor of staying around corners and other sources of cover to avoid having the robots' attention for too long. Finally, you shouldn't invest into movement speed unless you have too many credits to spare, as a single rocket jump will give you all the mobility you need.

Weapons

Primary

Secondary

Melee