Introduction
While the Soldier has a selection of Fighting Styles that help shape and inform what kind of weapons they might use, none of their feats are exclusive to particular styles. This gives us a lot of flexibility in the direction our Soldier goes. What matters most is that our feats can use the right kind of weapons. Some feats are for automatic weapons, others are for area weapons or specific types of area, such as burst or cone.
When choosing feats, remember how subordinate actions work. If a feat, such as Widen Area, says that if the next Action you use is Area Fire or Auto-Fire, then the benefits of Widen Area would not apply to Shoving Shot, even though it makes you do an Area Fire or Auto-Fire as part of it. This isn’t to say you should avoid one or the other or never take both, just to consider that they can’t be used in the same turn.
Table of Contents
Understanding RPGBOT’s Rating System
RPGBOT uses a 4-tier rating scheme which is simple to understand and easy to read at a glance.
- : Bad, useless options, or options which are extremely situational. Nearly never useful.
- : OK options, or useful options that only apply in rare circumstances. Useful sometimes.
- : Good options. Useful often.
- : Fantastic options, often essential to the function of your character. Useful very frequently.
Soldier Class Feats
1st-Level Soldier Feats
- : This is basically a Hero Point once per hour for Athletics Actions. Barring some sort of Ancestry-based non-hand Athletics option, this feat will only appeal to Armor Storm Soldiers due to their ability to perform all of those Actions without a free hand.
- : An extra chance to suppress a target who passes their save on the area attack isn’t a bad use of a Reaction. If they also happen to have a poor Will save, that’s even better.
- : For the Soldier who wants to be able to fight both in melee and at range, this works well enough. It does have the unfortunate problem where if something with Reactive Strike walks up to you, they can take a swing when you swap weapons.
- : There are only two weapons that have a Reload of 2 as of this writing. Basically, unless you’re using a machine gun, don’t take this feat. If you using a machine gun, this feat is probably mandatory.
- : The weirdness with this feat is that the Close Quarters style that would most likely use this gets it for free. However, the feat treats melee weapons as area weapons during use, which works quite well with any style except Action Hero, which requires automatic weapons to get benefits.
2nd-Level Soldier Feats
- : An area of effect Demoralize action is pretty good. Because it can only target suppressed creatures, it pairs a little better with Bombard’s ability to still suppress on a success, but it works on any Soldier thanks to being able to replace Charisma with Constitution for Demoralize. There is also a case to be made for poaching this feat from the Soldier Archetype if there is a Soldier in your party for additional AoE Demoralize checks. This also doesn’t have the Linguistic trait, so it appears that you don’t need to worry about languages.
- : It’s such a small amount of Temporary Hit Points once an hour. It’s just not worth using.
- : This is the best kind of Action compression. Getting to Stride before using Area Fire or Auto-Fire helps with several problems, such as keeping allies out of a cone or just plain old covering extra distance.
- : What I love about this feat is that it sets you up to take the hit for an ally and gives you a resistance to forced movement, but it still lets the Soldier make their attack for the same amount of Actions. It’s green because not every party will be able to take advantage of the Reaction.
4th-Level Soldier Feats
- : The Soldier has to knock an enemy to 0 with Auto-Fire to demoralize another target inside the cone. It’s not a bad effect, it’s just a very narrow set of conditions.
- : This feat is for two kinds of PCs. First is Action Heroes because they can suppress with ranged Strikes. Second is anyone poaching the feat via Archetype to get an extra bonus out of Striking the suppressed targets.
- : This feat squeezes a little extra focused damage out of an area weapon so long as the previous Action was a basic Area Fire activity.
- : Most often, this will be used to push a target away, but with an area burst weapon, it can push in practically any direction so long as the shot is centered correctly.
- : Sometimes you just need a little more space. Do take note that this won’t combine with any feats that do something and also make an Area Fire or Auto-Fire attack, such as Shot on the Run.
6th-Level Soldier Feats
- : Remember that suppression already gives a -1 Circumstance penalty to our targets’ attacks so, this is only an extra -1 compared to that and it only benefits a single ally.
- : Covering your foes in smoke does protect you from their attacks, but it also protects them from your allies’ attacks. This can be useful in the right group, though, if you rely more on saves and less on Strikes
- : Ideally, you wouldn’t go unconscious to begin with, but when has that plan ever actually worked?
- : Unfortunately, this feat has a flaw as written. Our ability to use Constitution with Intimidation only applies to Demoralize and Coercion. It also has the same problem as Covering Fire where the penalty is the same type as Suppressed and does not stack.
- : It’s not a bad way to make some space if enemies get too close. The damage never scales, but the attack bonus will scale if you improve your force field or shield.
- : If you’re a melee Soldier, this is Reactive Strike but it lacks the power to disrupt anything on a critical hit. Instead, it ignores the Unwieldy trait to allow it to function.
8th-Level Soldier Feats
- : Halving the ammo consumption of ammo hungry automatic weapons can be incredibly useful if those are your style.
- : At first this might seem like a bad trade, -2 AC for resist all. But that is the same penalty as Off-Guard and will not stack. If you expect to be flanked, tripped, or otherwise Off-Guard, then popping this to add resistance is very smart.
- : This is for whenever you need to focus attacks onto a single target with your automatic weapon and cannot be using Auto-Fire.
- : Ranged Reactive Strike is a very strong option, but I’m not sure it can be used with area weapons. It doesn’t call that out but the Area trait does say it can only make Area Fire attacks. It might be intended to treat the attack like a Primary Target attack, which also ignores the Area rule, but it does not say that.
- : Getting to do two turns worth of Area Fire in one is great. Even with the required cooldown period of one turn, that’s not losing any damage. It does, however, mean that targets will not be Suppressed on the second round. That said, if you’re taking persistent Cold damage, you can cheese away the cooldown.
10th-Level Soldier Feats
- : Upgrading any Suppression you inflict with attacks from -10 foot to -20 foot penalty is incredibly mean. Enemies will almost be nailed to the floor at this rate. Do pay attention to the with attacks part: the Erudite Warrior’s Oppressive Presence Action is not an attack.
- : A little extra damage for an extra setup Action.
- : Once a day when you hit 0 HP, make an attack poorly and then go right back to dying.
- : The hard part is that the Off-Guard you inflict ends at the start of the target’s turn. Your party might like to Delay to manipulate when you are able to make it Off-Guard, otherwise this might be wasted simply due to the initiative order. While Dance! Works with any form of suppression you inflict, it has an additional effect when using Auto-Fire on a single target. In that case, the solo target takes a -1 penalty to their save vs the Auto-Fire. It just doesn’t stack up against the rest of these options at this level.
- : There are two things to note about this feat. A Large or larger sized Soldier has more adjacent squares to pick, and, because the Difficult Terrain is permanent until cleared, it will stack to Greater Difficult Terrain upon a second use, creating a powerful speedbump when added to Suppression.
12th-Level Soldier Feats
- : This creates a strong control zone until your next turn by causing damage to anyone that moves through the area of your last cone. Depending on how long the cone is and how long of a chokepoint you can create, the damage can get fairly large.
- : This is dangerous unless your party can get behind some hard cover. If they can, go nuts.
- : Shoving Shot is great and this improves it, but take note this doesn’t change the failure effect, which was already 10 feet. It does change success from 0 to 5 feet and critical failure from 15 to 20 feet, plus prone.
- : You can use this after rolling to know how this will affect things. I’m not sure if this works on chain lightning, but, assuming that it does, you could possibly improve an ally to Critical Success to end the chain.
- : While it sounds silly, and it totally is a silly concept, the mobility this grants is great.
14th-Level Soldier Feats
- : You’ve spent this whole time only getting to attack once each round and here, you finally get to do it twice.
- : Statistically, if you Area Fire or Auto-Fire every round, enemies will regularly get some Critical Failures, but you can’t control when that happens. Still, fleeing has some fun synergy with Bullet Hell, especially if the enemies are closer to you.
- : Shoving Shot becomes an AoE.
- : Some of these areas can get incredibly large, and the Difficult Terrain is not temporary. Note that this means using the ability twice in the same area will create Greater Difficult Terrain. This is because for the second Terror-Forming action, the area will already be Difficult Terrain. If you’re also using Shell Shower as one of the Soldier types that can avoid self damage, it’s possible to immediately pile up greater difficult terrain around yourself. You could technically do it as any Soldier, but it’s herder if you can’t ignore taking the damage yourself too.
- : It is ‘resist all’, which is nice, but it only triggers on Strikes, which is most but not all things that could damage you.
16th-Level Soldier Feats
- : Removing concealment and hidden flat checks for your entire team is one of the better forms of support. It’s nice to have it functionally at-will.
- : It’s going to be uncommon to have only one target in the area of your attack. If you have Concentrated Shot, this is more likely green.
- : Soldiers have a lot of good reactions. Being able to choose each day that one of those can be used an extra time each round is amazing.
18th-Level Soldier Feats
- : Giving your party extra Actions is great so long as they can make good uses of these.
- : If nothing else, this allows you to hold a shield while also holding a two-handed gun. Or two two-handed weapons.
- : Remember that Primary Target does not count towards multiple attack penalties. This is two attacks, without MAP, on top of an area attack. This is Double Slice, with a gun.
20th-Level Soldier Feats
- : The most wild Action compression, which turns Area Fire and Auto-Fire into a 1-Action Activity. The most common reason to use this is to follow up a 2-action feat or to just make two attacks while having a third free Action. Note that the limitation is only on using the Area Fire or Auto-Fire actions, not on using Activities that contain those actions. As such, you can use two and then follow with Fan the Hammer to sneak in a third.
- : There are a lot of good combinations that can really hose your opponents. Some examples:
- : Put your foes inside a cloud that conceals you from them, but then also make those same foes unable to benefit from concealment.
- : Push all the targets away while leaving difficult terrain to make it harder to return.
- : Add a bonus Stride to any feat.
