Whirling Swipe and Melee Soldiers

[siegfriedliner]

I have just started to play test a melee focused soldier and am finding it very solid at level 1.

You can do a lot of damage (by starfinder standards) and have a nice reaction.

But looking at options for levelling up I noticed a lot of feats that require an area effect weapon and can't be used whilat wielding a two handed melee weapon and a lot of area attack + actions that clash with whirling Swipe.

I was wondering if whirling Swipe was a stance that gave melee weapons the burst 5 and unweildy trait would that be broken it would certainly add a lot more options for a melee soldier.

[DMurnett]

I think a stance-based Whirling Swipe should be the thing Close Quarters actually gives you to start with instead of an albeit useful Reactive Strike side-grade. Just make that one a level 1 feat that any soldier can take, or even just roll it into Overwatch since it's basically the same thing. I feel like the team simultaneously hasn't done enough to make melee work in this system while also not making ranged actually on par with how good melee is in PF. Still, I want more melee.

[Teridax]

Whirling Swipe sits in an awkward position because the action only lets it interact internally with Area Fire, but not with anything else that normally does. For this to integrate properly with the rest of the Soldier's feats, they'd have to integrate Whirling Swipe into the text, which would stretch it even more beyond the current overlong repetition of "Area Fire or Auto-Fire attack".

Personally, I already find it quite silly that there are two different actions for AoE in the first place when they work very similarly, and condensing those to just one would have made things a lot simpler already. Had Whirling Swipe simply given the corresponding AoE trait to melee weapons, instead of using its own action, they would've integrated much more easily with all of the Soldier's other feats. At that point, that might as well be the benefit for the Close Quarters subclass rather than what they have now, given how the feat is already necessary to start fighting properly in melee.