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To me, the Soldier's usage of Constitution in their feature list reads a bit like Gretchen Wieners from Mean Girls trying to make "fetch" happen: it feels awkward, there are better-fitting alternatives out there, and every additional attempt at trying to make it happen only grates further.

Specifically, the three major points of dysfunction in my opinion are Walking Armory, Fearsome Bulwark, and Primary Target: Walking Armory is basically there to make Con do the work of Strength, even though the class wears heavy armor, looks like they should be really strong, and nearly half their subclasses use Strength. Fearsome Bulwark makes your Charisma in Intimidation worthless partway through your leveling, whereas there already exists a feat to let your Strength make you more intimidating. Finally, Primary Target requires you to invest in Dex to not make awful ranged Strikes, even though the class is otherwise explicitly designed to dump Dex by wearing heavy armor and using their class DC for ranged attacks. It's a mess, and the end result is likely going to be a lot of weedy, low-Strength Soldiers with high Int, which while well-served by the Erudite Warrior subclass and their entirely unnecessary auto-scaling skill, I don't think ought to define the whole class.

Meanwhile, let's consider what a Strength-based Soldier would look like: they wouldn't need help wearing armor or carrying items, because that's what Strength covers already, and they wouldn't need a stat switch for Intimidation checks, because they can already plug their Strength into those with feat support. You could even just give them Athletics instead of Intimidation as a base skill, and let them opt into Intimidation simply because it's fitting for the class (this would also help Armor Storm Soldiers, who currently don't become trained in the skill they need to be actually good at their subclass's benefit). The only thing you'd need would be an adjustment to Primary Fire or to the base...

I am in complete agreement with you, they should be able to choose Str or Con, and whichever KAS you choose is what abilities can key off of. Primary Target should be Str or Con, and Str or Con should have more function than "how much can I carry?" (and health for con) I wrote a whole lot of stuff similar to what you did above you and it doesn't seem like anybody jumped on me, not quite sure why you're getting so much sass and negative attention for... checks notes playtesting and talking about your findings?

Cred-Lites (just called Lites) should definitely be a thing.

Bloed&Bloeder wrote:

If no ammo scaled, ranged combat would always be awkward with very low magazine sizes.

Unless you increased the magazine sizes, which is pretty much what I'm proposing. Universalize the ammo's costs, and leave the actual magazine size entirely up to the weapon, with a reload costing the same for all weapons that use that type of ammo. A machine gun costs as much to load as a semi-auto pistol, for example, or maybe a better comparison would be a machine gun and an auto-targeting rifle cost the same.

The real cost of ammo shouldn't come from difficulty to afford it, but the action costs of needing to reload your gun, since ammo is effectively just there to enable combat. Reloading and action compression around reloading are much more important IMO and help keep the game from devolving into everyone hiding behind boxes and blasting away without moving.

My issue here is some Automatic Guns (Magnetar) have Incredibly tiny mag sizes (6) and that implies you can only hit 3 enemies with the auto-fire at base mag size.

So, the title is obviously clickbait, but I do agree that there are implementation problems with area weapons that have been left unsolved, despite those problems having been brought up a year ago. There’s no real reason to go for simple or martial area weapons when advanced weapons exist and aren’t gated by weapon proficiency. Additionally, the Soldier’s a bit of a one-trick pony right now where they’re made to use AoE attacks even when there are no enemies close enough together to catch. AoE weapons need to be hooked up to weapon proficiency somehow, and the Soldier needs to start out with a slightly different array of tools, instead of having all of their power concentrated into one attack and one attribute.

I would love for Strength to be a better secondary stat, for Auto-Fire to have a feat for making it a line and it could be locked behind STR+2 or +3, or Using your strength to control your rapid bursts, getting to negate a number of creatures in your Auto-Fire cone up to Str mod+tracking so you can use it while your buds are in the fray or if you want to target creatures who are further away if you don't have the capacity or want to focus on a particular group (like backline spellcasters).

Something for Area fire so it can go farther than the range increment depending on your Str bonus, as you heft the weapon up higher and angle it more precisely. Even a Dex Locked Feat with an action to make a one-handed non-Automatic weapon into an Automatic Weapon would be cool and slap tremendously. there is already fan the hammer for using multiple area attacks, and Whirling Swipe for Melee to be an Area Attack but literally nothing to turn a ranged weapon into an automatic, which would be satisfying and open up the gameplay for the pretty shallow class.