QUICK JUMP
| Vitals | Health | 200 HP | |||
| Primary Weapon | |||||
| Rocket Launcher | 105-115 (270) | 50-90 (270) | 45-60 (270) | ||
| Secondary Weapon | |||||
| Shotgun | 80-90 (180) | 10-30 | 3-10 | ||
| Melee Weapon | |||||
| Shovel | 45-85 (195) | ||||
Soldier Strategies
The soldier is one of the most common classes in Team Fortress. You will rarely play on a server without any soliders.
The reason is because it is really easy to adapt to, especially for gamers first playing Team Fortress or that are the "twitch" style of player.
Packing a rocket launcher, a shotgun, and a shovel, the soldier is a devastating class. The rocket launcher is deadly at every range, and when you add in the frequency of critical rockets; you see the true power of the soldier.
Even with 300 health and all this vast array of deadly weaponry, you can't mention the soldier without talking about his most useful ability: the rocket jump.
Rocket Jumping
Rocket jumping is when a soldier uses his rockets to propel himself high into the air...
Rocket jumping is when a soldier uses his rocket to propel himself high into the air, to places other classes only dream of reaching. Enemy team have a lot of snipers? No problem. Run off of your sniper deck, rocket jump onto the bridge, rocket jump again to the other end of the bridge, and rocket jump again onto their sniper deck and kill them. You'll go from your deck to their deck in 10 seconds or less and be airborn most of the time.
Eventually an engineer might get aggressive and waste his sentry gun and build it on the sniper deck. However, the sniper deck is so open to rocket jumping that trying to lock it down with sentry guns (or demomen) is laughable.
Most engineers will build their gun in the hallway to the main respawn; this way, they think demomen can't shoot grenades into it from the ground, and soldiers can't jump onto the deck because if they do, it will see it. Good idea, right? Wrong.
Most people don't understand the true ability of rocket jumping. I can rocket jump from the ground, over the entire wall (or land on top of the wall, depends on what I want to do) in 1 jump.
Here is an example of this jump:
I'm not going to load this page with 400 videos. I'm going to give you this video, and tell you how to do it.
Naturally you know the location and you see what I did from my eyes, but the keys I press are what you need to know. This isn't a normal rocket jump. This is called a crouch rocket jump. Crouching as you rocket jump gives you twice the height. Basically, you crouch and jump the same way you would jump in real life. To dunk a basketball, you bend your knees then jump. You don't just jump from a straight position.
So here, you run forward. Point your gun down, then fire, crouch, and jump at the same time. It should be one button press in the eyes of the game. For me, it's Control to crouch, Space to jump, and Mouse 1 to fire. To I use my pinkie to crouch, my thumb to jump, and my middle/ring/index fingers to control my movement. Then I use my other hand to use the mouse.
Press these buttons together, and away you will go. This may take some practice but as you see; it IS possible.
By controlling your momentum in the air, you can stop yourself on the wall. This is fun to kill snipers. People always expect to see soldiers coming, but they never expect them to appear on the walls like that. It's awesome.
You can rocket jump virtually anywhere. And I do mean ANYWHERE. Experiment. I am not going to tell you every place you can rocket jump. Just experiment. Have fun!
Alright, lets take a look at your weapons.
The Rocket Launcher
The rocker launcher is your most effective weapon. The only real negative of it is you need to watch where you aim at close distances because you can easily kill yourself if you aren't careful.
As you can see in the chart above, it has fairly good long distance damage, too. Lots of soldiers fire rockets at the sniper deck as they approach the enemy base. You can, and likely will get kills this way, plus it gives you cover.
Aiming with the rocket launcher will take practice. The rocket launcher in Team Fortress is a lot slower than other FPS games. In Team Fortress, you actually have time to side step the rockets.
In games like Quake 2, a rocket launcher pretty much meant instant death. In TF2, I often jump and dodge soldiers' rockets in the water tunnel as a pyro and kill them point blank without ever taking any damage at all. It takes practice, but you can dodge them in close quarters very easily.
The reason they are easy to dodge is the because of the way you have to use the rocket launcher. Because of its speed, you have to "track" your enemy. Anticipate where they are going, and shoot there. However once you see the soldiers rocket launcher light up, start running backwards or to the side and you will easily dodge their rocket.
Another common strategy is the "aim at the feet" method. I really don't have a better method but again, if you shoot at me like that, I am going to jump over them. You can easily jump over a rocket aimed at your feet because it's at the right height and you won't take damage.
It really depends on the player. When I play soldier, I mainly try and fire 2 rockets back to back; one where I think they are going, and one where they might go if they try and dodge it.
...the rocket launcher is an excellent weapon to destroy sentry guns...
Also keep in mind that the Soldier is an offensive class, and the rocket launcher is an excellent weapon to destroy sentry guns. If you hear a team mate say there is a sentry gun somewhere, you should go help destroy it.
Make sure you are fully reloaded, then step out slightly and fire 2 rockets at it. Reload, and fire 2 more. Reload, fire 2 more. Always keep 2 ready, and fire 2 at a time. If you fire all 4, the time it takes you to reload will let an engineer heal his sentry gun almost fully.
After a few rockets, a sentry gun will go down, even with an engineer and dispenser guarding it. You just have to pace it properly.
The Shotgun
The shotgun is a useful gun, and a solid secondary weapon but honestly, not many soldiers utilize it. Your rocket launcher is a much more powerful weapon.
The only time I really utilize the shotgun as a soldier is when I have rocket jumped onto a high place and I don't want to waste all of my rockets on possible-missed shots. The shotgun travels much faster even though it does less damage from afar, but you can get off 6 shots rapid fire.
That's pretty much the solid information about the soldier. I don't want to go into everything on this class. Experiment with rocket jumping; it can get you places much faster, even in your own base. If you hear that someone has your intelligence, rocket jumping around gets you places faster.
As I often say; why walk when you fly?