After several years I'm going to finally call this guide "complete".

This guide is basically my opinions on every single weapon soldier can equip, mostly a brief blurb stating whether I think the weapon is good or not and if it's great I'll go into a bit of reasoning why.

If you're a new player looking to main soldier and you've found this guide... uhh good luck interpreting my nonsense. Feel free to ask questions below.

Stock launcher is an incredible weapon. Not just because it's a stock weapon, but it has an incredibly healthy balance. 4 rockets, 20 in reserve. Does great damage, fires pretty fast. Well rounded splash area. Very strong weapon, and honestly one of the best weapons in the game imho.

Same statistics as the rocket launcher but it has 3 rockets in the clip. It also recovers 15 health when you hit something which is the main draw of the weapon. A very useful upside, but it can sometimes be negligible. Useful in most situations, but you will see the reduced rocket count really hurt your bombs.

A decent option for some combo stuff, and practicing airshoots without using the direct miss. It does the job, but keep in mind there is a reason why I have a personal meme that this weapon does 1-2 damage on critical hits. Damage fall-off on any rocket launcher is a lot more of a problem than you'd expect.

A fun weapon to talk about. Instead of having rockets loaded, you load them in yourself and shoot them all at once. Great AoE potential, but not great for reflexive kills. Still a very strong weapon. Can also overload it which blows you up for interesting jumps, but this was nerfed heavily so I'm not sure if it's still viable I guess it's still viable, the jumps just take more work. I've heard it called an offensive weapon, but I think it's really strong on both offense and defense spam.

Very fast little rockets with very little spread. Its main advantages is it minicrits any enemy launched airborne by an explosive. Great for learning Soldier basics like juggling and airshots.

Same thing as the stock but the rockets fire from the center of the screen. Whichever you use is really a matter of preference.

I hate this weapon. You can charge it up for a pretty big damage blast that lights up enemies and disables sentries. Takes a long time to charge though. Its other appeal is the fact that it doesn't take ammo, but it still gets reloaded. I'm editing this guide several years later. The cow mangler does kind of suck, but it's incredibly fun and super funny to use. Amazing weapon 10/10 I love it.

Air Strike

New weapon from the love and war update. Starts off with 3 rockets that do very little damage and have lowered splash. Every kill lets you load another rocket into your clip capping out at 8. When rocket jumping, your rockets fire faster. Very nice when its capped out, but good luck getting that to happen thanks to the -25% damage.
MUSELK LIED TO YOU THIS WEAPON IS STILL BAD.

Similar edit from years later. I still think it sucks but it's nowhere near as garbage as I initially thought. It has its use cases, and strong maps. Mostly good for a laugh, but there are viable reasons to use this weapon if you need something strong.

Stock option so always solid. There are better secondaries out there for different scenarios, but this is just great for doing more damage if you need it.


what i think of the righteous bison[media.tenor.com]

Possibly one of the best items in the game. You take -60% blast damage from rocket jumps, so you go from only really being able to bomb to being able to do jumps at almost no health. I think the most I've taken was 20 from blast. They're great for aggresiveness.

This thing is godly for trolldier, obv, but also has incredibly weird rare use niche cases. Unironically have seen pro level roamers running this. odd weapon when not doing trolldier and can actually do some silly things.

this thing low key kinda sucks. it's pretty good for just pooping out a lot of damage if your team is organized, but generally you pop it, walk in, and immediately die.

This is the best secondary in the game. The more I use it, the more broken I realize it is. Random crits aside:
1. snipers can no longer headshot you
2. nice kritz lmao
3. demoknight? more like demo.... poop... no crits face....
4. lol u want minicrit reflect? LOL. LMAO.
5. NICE JARATE SUCKER
6. Haha you can't backstab m- AAAAAAAAAAAGH
(yes spy can still backstab you, it's a joke. sorry for explaining it but some people are exceptionally dense.)

Negating crits and lowering sentry damage in an AoE is just, "Okay time to walk in for free."

FUN FACT: IF YOUR TEAM DOESN'T FOLLOW YOU IN THIS THING IS ONLY OKAY. CAN STILL FACE TANK THE ENTIRE ENEMY TEAM THOUGH.

low-key this thing REALLY sucks. you cannot give me a valid reason to run this over the backup or the banner.

funny. circumstancially good if the enemy snipers suck. If they don't then it's REALLY useless.

... stock melee generally is just bad lol.

Generally one of the two best melee options for soldier. Can get haha funne kills even when not doing trolldier.

great for a laugh. no one ever sees it coming.


my usual victim for soldier melee because being at low HP and running as fast as a scout feels good man. saved me more times than I can count.

for when you want to feel more like a scout. generally bad because bullets already hurt.

unless there is a katana wielding demoknight tearing apart your team, and you are a GOD at melee, this is generally just very high risk high reward. Incredibly fun I'm sure but insanely unreliable because melee hit detection is whack.

whip your heavy to make him go faster. otherwise kinda crap because you rocket jump faster than the move speed bonus. great for getting a heavy to point fast, helping your friendly engineer, or for screwing up your sniper's aim. This also has the highest random crit rate of any melee weapon. No, I'm serious. Don't make me get the tinfoil hat and explain it, just try it and trust me. Something is broken with this weapon. Don't tell anyone so Valve doesn't look into it. Or even worse... Shounic.

seriously do not whip snipers. i used to wonder why my Sniper HL teammate got mad at me for whipping them to save my life (complicated situation), and I learned it's because it REALLY screws up your muscle memory.

07/10/2023
Final build unless we ever see a weapon rebalancing patch, or if I start tooling around with other weird weapons. Do not play soldier as much as I used to, generally play Sniper/Scout these days.

01/28/2023 5 years.... adjusted some opinions on weapons I use more now than I did 5 years ago. namely my new love, the Battalion's Backup

9/27/17 - Has it really been 3 years...? Uhh... added a proper one for the bison because i have more experience with it.

11/21/2014 - Updated Gunboats, and adjusted the Beggar's.

11/12/2014 - Updated most of the primary weapons to have paragraphs instead of bullets. Opened to the public for critique.