Class Preview: The Soldier

Friday, May 26, 2017

As soon as we announced Starfinder, there were fans that wanted to know what kind of options there would be for the heavy-armor-wearing, magic-plasma-cannon-firing, jet-packed combatant character. While any Starfinder character can do those things if they dedicate themselves to getting the needed resources, the character who does it most easily (and gets the most class features designed to work with such actions) is the soldier. This is the description the soldier gets in the Starfinder Core Rulebook:

Conflict is an inevitable result of life. On every world that harbors complex living organisms, creatures battle one another for dominance, resources, territory, or ideals. Whether you've taken up arms to protect others, win glory, exact revenge, or simply earn a living, you are the perfect embodiment of this truth. You're an expert at combat of all types but tend to prefer heavy armor and weapons—the bigger, the better. You may be a career soldier, a fresh mercenary recruit, or a lone wolf who rejects authority, but whether rushing in for hand-to-hand combat or firing tactical barrages, you're a consummate warrior, never hesitating to put yourself in the line of fire to protect your friends.

Soldiers are masters of weapons and armor of all types, with a good base attack bonus progression (and good Fortitude and Will save progressions); proficiency in light armor, heavy armor, and grenades; and proficiency (and eventually specialization) in basic and advanced melee weapons, small arms, longarms, heavy weapons, and sniper weapons. Since small arms and many basic melee weapons gain only half the damage boost from specialization that longarms and heavy weapons do, soldiers often prefer to use the bulkier weapon options to maximize the damage they deal. Since specializing in heavy weapons first requires you to be proficient with heavy weapons, which in turn requires proficiency with longarms, it's a much more significant investment for any other class to do the same.

But a soldier is not simply a killer or thug—she's a trained professional combatant with access to thousands of years of military theory and modern education systems. That education tends to be pretty focused, but it's still enough to get the solider 8 class skills and 4 skill points per level. The Athletics skill covers the need to climb, jump, and swim to get to advantageous positions in combat (though by 2nd or 3rd level, jump jets are a common armor upgrade that easily increases mobility, and by 5th or 6th level they're likely to be replaced by a jetpack armor upgrade). That still leaves 3 skill points even for a soldier with a 10 Intelligence to spread around class skills such as Acrobatics (useful if you want to get the most out of that jetpack, but not necessary for basic flight), Engineering, Intimidate, Medicine, Piloting, Profession, and Survival.

Since the soldier class's focus is clearly on combat, there's much more to her offensive and defensive abilities than just base attack bonuses, proficiencies, and specializations. Every soldier begins play with a fighting style, which grants special combat options tied to a specific approach to combat as the soldier gains levels. There are 7 fighting styles to choose from—arcane assailant, armor storm, blitz, bombard, guard, hit-and-run, and sharpshoot. A soldier also picks up some of a second fighting style beginning at 9th level. In addition to fighting styles, a soldier gains gear boosts that enhance the soldier's effectiveness with specific equipment (such as anchoring arcana, armored advantage, laser accuracy, and plasma immolation) at 3rd level and every 4 levels thereafter, and a bonus combat feat at 2nd level and every 2 levels thereafter.

The bonus combat feats leave the soldier free to use the feats all characters gain at every odd level to expand beyond combat effectiveness. Other than proficiencies and specializations, feats generally have at most one other feat and a few base attack or ability score minimums as prerequisites, making even a few bonus feats able to cover a wide range of options. (For example, the Shot on the Run feat requires only Mobility, a +4 base attack bonus, and a 15 Dexterity—all easily achieved by a soldier.) Even at 1st level, any soldier could take Skill Synergy to gain 2 new skills as class skill. Or if a player preferred, by 2nd level a soldier can have selected Weapon Focus and then Versatile Focus to gain the benefit of Weapon Focus with every weapon with which the soldier is proficient.

Since fighting styles are going to be an important part of any soldier's design, here's a look at the 5th-level ability from the arcane assailant fighting style.

Secret of the Magi (SU)

When you imbue a weapon with the rune of the eldritch knight, in addition to its normal benefits, the rune grants the weapon one of the following weapon fusions of your choice: ethereal, flaming, frost, merciful, or shock. The weapon can't gain a fusion it already has, and this bonus fusion doesn't count toward the maximum total level of fusions the weapon can have at once. The bonus fusion ends when the weapon ceases to be imbued with the rune of the eldritch knight. For more information on fusions, see page 191.

With that, we've covered more than half of the Starfinder classes—check out paizo.com/starfinder to find links to previous blogs presenting the envoy, mystic, operative, and soldier. We're going to take a little break from classes next week in order to preview some other elements of the game, but in the months before the game's release this August, we'll preview the remaining three—the mechanic, solarian, and technomancer!

Owen KC Stephens
Developer

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There is a feat that gives you two new class skills of your choice, I think.


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CKent83 wrote:
I just hope it isn't something like the Soldier having more options compared to the Fighter. If being a one trick pony makes you less useful than the other classes, just beef up that one trick until it evens out. Leave inflicting status conditions to the other classes; the "I use weapons really well" class should only worry about inflicting one condition: death!

If I'm carrying a flamethrower it can pretty fairly be assumed I'm doing so because I want to set things on fire.


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CKent83 wrote:
Opsylum wrote:
In my head-canon, galactic civilization is in an era akin to 17th century Europe. Of the three major territorial factions we've learned about, two of them appear to be straight-up empires (Veskarium, Azlanti - which I assume is a territorial empire) with strong expansionist urges. This results in training a military that will be fighting across a wide variety of alien terrains, where sensory perceptions may often be unintuitive, which leads many soldiers to rely on implants and augmentations for this skill. As a result, it's become far more effective to train soldiers to be able to take hits and neutralize threats quickly than to spend time rooting threats out ahead of time. Sorta like line infantry logic (which, incidentally, looks very similar to what's going on in the "Five Differences" blog illustration). This has led to a lot of scientific investment and innovation in power armor, which has advanced to the point where most soldiers can take a lot of hits before finally going down.
Does no one do guard duty in space? Even with power armor, you still need situational awareness.

Nah Bro, thats what the HUDS/AI in the power armor is for. Jarvais has got your back. ;P


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Bluenose wrote:
If I'm carrying a flamethrower it can pretty fairly be assumed I'm doing so because I want to set things on fire.

Wait a minute ... does this mean we can have a flaming flamethrower?


Distant Scholar wrote:
Bluenose wrote:
If I'm carrying a flamethrower it can pretty fairly be assumed I'm doing so because I want to set things on fire.
Wait a minute ... does this mean we can have a flaming flamethrower?

The frost flamethrower is much better.


Since we cant do static bonuses anymore why not go for a Flaming, Frost, Shocking Corrosive Thrower and really leave them confused? "i know i am dying but i dont really get what did me in."


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It's possible that the Guard specialization gives Perception as a class skill.


Stone Dog wrote:
Extrapolating from this picture it looks like Soldiers have a D12 hit dice.

Actually, from other reading races get hps. So it would probably be soldier d10, Versk 2hp, con +1. Not sure if the racial hps are one time or per level.


It can't be that vesk only get 2 hp, 2 hp so far has been only for small or frail races, they most likely get at least 6 like the shirren. Even elves get 4.

Scarab Sages

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I'm pretty sure Soldiers get 7 hp per level, plus 6 from Vesk. Con affects stamania, not hp.


John Smithey 796 wrote:
Stone Dog wrote:
Extrapolating from this picture it looks like Soldiers have a D12 hit dice.
Actually, from other reading races get hps. So it would probably be soldier d10, Versk 2hp, con +1. Not sure if the racial hps are one time or per level.

Actually early on in the Q&A thread they revealed slyly that HD are gone from the game.

Nowhere are they even mentioned in First Contact or any of the rules quotations or preview sheets that have made it to the web so far.

There is a photo of the first two pages of the Mystic from the new core rules around and it does not mention hit die in any way.

I am pretty sure that SP/HP are derived by set values from class, race and Constitution now. Not sure how yet but that is my guess.


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At level 1, you get HP from race.
At every level (including 1), you get HP from class.
At every level, you get Stamina from class and CON mod.
Vesk have 6 HP.
Soldier has 7 HP and 7 Stamina.
The iconic has +1 CON at level 1.
The end result at level 1 is 7+6=13 HP and 7+1=8 Stamina.
At level 5, her CON is bumped by the stat boop to +2, so she has 7*5+6=41HP and (7+2)*5=45 Stamina.


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

One Soldier ability I wanted to call attention to because I didn't see it elsewhere: Grenade Specialist (mentioned in First Contact) lets a soldier always have one level 1 grenade for free (after 10 minutes of work). Not sure what the level requirement / prerequisites might be, but it seems like a neat ability.

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