Soldier buff

[Legrad]

Soldier feeling himself not quite well in FoA. With the release of Zerker a lot of soldier archetypes are severely powercreeped. Most notably its Bleed and Pierce Soldier specs.
There’s already a very good suggestion in OP things_ topic

@banana_peel

Cadence. And melee Soldier in general while we are at it
Ceno has a good topic on Cadence. The skill itself is not among the worst but its falling off highlights the gap between the “old” skills and the new toys. As for melee Soldier in general, I like some of Markovian and Zolhan fresh mod additions. But they aren’t nearly enough. Soldier quickly became outdated as a bonking mastery, and it shouldn’t. I think the mastery needs a flat source that’s not tied to Cadence or restricted exclusive. Pretty much every last row passive of Soldier is weak and outdated. Give Decorated Soldier some phys flat and move slow res to Scars. Nothing will become broken, trust. And will resolve some of those Cadence problems.

But i also want to add some suggestions.
First of all, let’s focus on one of the Soldier’s selling points - War Cry.

• Add pierce/bleed flat rr on Break Morale - i think its quite fitting, because we already have bleed-focused Blade Arc (and also quite a lot of items which support Bleed Soldier, like Bloodrager/Jarldin sets) and pierce damage% on Deadly Momentum and Oleron’s Rage. Yes, we somewhat already have it in the form of Terrify, but… uh… its just bad to use. Changing Terrify into oathkeeper-like mutator, which will switch flat phys rr on Break Morale to Bleed/Pierce would be also nice.

• Make cooldown of War Cry 4,5-5 secounds. Maybe with level scaling, so we will need to get levels of War Cry to get to this cooldown. Seriously, the fact what any phys soldier build which is not snb warlord hard-locked into 2(!) helmets, to have 100% uptime on warcry is just feels bad. Especially with addition of Berserker which have no such problems with his cry.

Second skill which really needs buff is imo Menhir’s Will.
Worst circuit breaker in the game by far.

Restrictive skill which procs on 33% hp and does nothing but regen and one-time healing, this skill is very underpowered and outdated. Just the fact what its the only restrictive circuit breaker in the game should make it if not the best saving skill, but at least strong.
Suggestions:

• Increase proc treshhold to 50-60%, so this skill can be reliable.

• Make Healing over-time, it will really support bleed Soldier.

• Add any form of damage mitigation - either max res%, flat absorb, or %absorb

[Smish.smash.smosh]

Poor ol’ solly struggling to keep up in FoA. Definitely a fan of adding the flat pierce and bleed rr to war cry! Would make bleed blademaster less of a meme

Also big agree on raising the threshold for Menhir’s will proccing. As it stands now, you get brought down to 40% and a big hit just kills you immediately without the circuit breaker even activating.

Let’s give soldier some love!

[RxJunkie]

@Legrad

Add pierce/bleed flat rr on Break Morale

Not possible. The only options for RtR are Elemental, Physical and All.

Just change it to All and we’re good! Soldier needs the RtR in high numbers to actually work well as evidenced by the Elemental items getting horse steroids.

@Legrad

Make cooldown of War Cry 4,5-5 secounds.

Sounds good here, you can get the CD down with something like a CDR Star Pact/Shield user as well right now, but not many others can. If you change the CD and the RtR to all damage then it makes for straight forward application for everybody using Soldier.

@Legrad

Second skill which really needs buff is imo Menhir’s Will.

Soldier is a Health Regen class (not a Health/sec class), so it fits with the current skills. If anything I would increase the activation threshold to maybe 50% and drop the max %Heal accordingly.

Also, I can see the addition of flat Damage Absorption being added as it’s based on Menhir. You already have %DAbsorp from the Eclusive so that would help.

[mad_lee]

I finally played some FoA and my first build contained Soldier. I agree with all the suggestions. To add to the op Soldier’s passives are not up to snuff these days. 1% hp scaling on Military Conditioning? 1% armor/7 OA/7 DA scaling on Field Command after 4/12? This stuff feels completely outdated nowadays, even its other passives like the one that give reduced Physique requirment feel outdated (you can manipulate your green items with rerolls and get sufficient attributes more easily now). Bleed res on Scars of Battle is mostly unused on Soldiers because they usually have a surplus of it.
Soldier mastery was known for providing easy stats/attributes and means of tank like hp and armor. Its hp passive has been diminished and there are classes that can naturally stack much more armor than Soldier. Like for example much more offensively potent builds like this Cold Wereraven Reaver. Or this simple melee Reaver.

I also agree that Break Morale should have all flat RR. That might finally make all those countless meme Acid and Cold and Fire Soldiers become something interesting and dare I say competitive.