The Soldier has always been the weapon master in all the Mass Effect games. He's basically the only one to be able to use any weapon class (apart from the SMG, which is just a lighter assault rifle). He also has a lot of ammo powers and a great firepower, but he lacks crowd control.

Powers : Adrenaline Rush, Concussive Shot, Distuptor Ammo, Incendiary Ammo, Cryo Ammo, Combat Mastery.
Weapons : Assault rifles, Sniper Rifles, Heavy pistols, Shotguns.

The soldier’s unique power, Adrenaline Rush, slows down time and increases your weapon damage. It lasts for 5 seconds and has an only 3 seconds cooldown. Very useful to line-up easy headshots and deal heavy damage, it also becomes a lifesaver when you find yourself outflanked. We’ll go into details later.

Then, you have 0 biotic/tech abilities : only ammo powers, and the concussive shot, which… sucks, to be honest.

What bonus power are we going to use ?

It depends on what you want to do. If you want to use the Revenant, Reave is definitely the bonus power you must take. If not, it’s still a great choice, because it gives you a great crowd-control and extra damage against barriers and armors. You may also wish to take a fourth ammo bonus power, but it’s not that useful in my opinion.

I heard of Slam and Stasis as bonuses power. ♥♥♥♥ choices. The first is simply not interesting, and the second gives you crowd control but prevents you from killing targets.

When you play against Geth, you can take Energy Drain instead of Reave (it will do the same thing as Reave, but with shields and synthetics), and then switch back to Reave after. It will cost you some eezo of course, but it's completely doable.

In this guide, I'll go with Reave.

Adrenaline Rush : Take all ranks. The final rank's choice depends on which assault rifle you wish to use. If you play with the Revenant, take the Hardened Adrenaline Rush : slowing time down by 70% won't be useful, because you lose too much rate of fire. And the Hardened AR's 50% damage reduction will allow you to shoot for a longer time.
If you don't play the Revenant, you will play with the Vindicator or the Mattock, which both benefit more from Heightened Adrenaline Rush and a 70% time dilatation. Headshots everywhere !

Concussive Shot : Only one point. It doesn't deal enough damage and cannot be boosted enough to be worthier. You will basically only use it when you need to stun an unprotected enemy.

Incendiary Ammo : Take all ranks, and then the Inferno ammo. No armor will resist you.


Disruptor Ammo : Take all ranks, and then the Heavy Disruptor Ammo. No shields nor synthetics will resist you.

Cryo Ammo : One or zero point. This power is completely useless on the soldier : the only targets you may wish to freeze are the health-regenerating ones (Krogan, Vorcha). And they will never survive your firepower long enough to regenerate :).

Combat Mastery : All ranks, and then the Shock Trooper to boost Paradon / Renegade points. A funny thing about the passive is that it increases your sprinting speed, which allows the Soldier to... slow the time down while sprinting. Yeah, I'm not kidding. You may wish to take Commando instead of Shock Trooper, in order to amplify this slowmo effect further.

Reave : All ranks, and then the area reave. Reave Soldier !

Spend your first points in Adrenaline Rush, Reave, and your passive. Reave will be more useful later (after the collector ship, when you get the revenant), but at the beginning it’s better to spend point in Reave than Cryo Ammo, Disruptor Ammo or Concussive Shot. Incendiary ammo at level 2 will be useful for the first missions.

You should max powers in this order : Adrenaline Rush / Combat Mastery / Reave / Incendiary Ammo / Disruptor Ammo.

Well, you have three choices : Revenant LMG (Assault Rifle), Widow (Sniper Rifle) and the Claymore (Shotgun).

All are great. Thing is, I don’t see the Soldier really benefiting from the Claymore (he’s not anywhere near the level of absurd rampage the Vanguard can trigger with this gun). So there are the Revenant and Widow left. And that depends on what you want to do : if you want to shoot with a big gun, great rate of fire and damage, suppressive fire, take the Revenant. If you’re more into precision shots with heavy time dilatation and the Mattock or the Vindicator, well, take the Widow – it will do fine too. Even if the Viper benefits more than the Widow from the time dilatation.

If you didn't read my weaponry guide, here are some tips about the weapons you should use.

Assault Rifle : If anybody can do something good with the Avenger, it’s the Soldier. Even this way, you may wish to take a better rifle. Mattock if you have, else Vindicator, until you can unlock the Revenant.

Sniper Rifle : The starting Mantis will do perfect until you unlock the Viper, which is better with Adrenaline Rush. You can still keep the Mantis (and as I said, take the Widow later) if you don’t like the Viper.

Heavy pistol : Phalanx if you have it, Carnifex otherwise.

Shotgun : Eviscerator or Geth Plasma Shotgun. Both are in DLCs. However, the Eviscerator is in the Cerberus Network DLC, so you should have it.

Heavy weapon : The best choice is probably the Avalanche, as it grants you even more crowd-control. The Arc Projector, as always, is also a good choice, especially if you’re facing heavy shields or synthetics. The Collector Beam will allow you to deal with shields and barriers from a long range.

A good choice is to play with squadmates who have powers that can make short work of protections (Overload, Warp, Incinerate) : Miranda, Garrus, Thane, Mordin (his Full Cryo Blast grants good crowd-control). As always, Team Dextro works perfectly : even if Tali does not really have powers to deal quickly with protections (however, the Energy Drain can help a bit), her Drone is yet another great crowd-control power that’ll allow you to wreak havoc while enemies are focused on Chatika.

Run and gun, basically. With the Soldier, you have the greatest health in the game, the ability to slow down time (by running AND with Adrenaline Rush) and Reave to regenerate and stun. That gives you an ability to go wherever you want on the battlefield, ability only the Infiltrator also has. So you can quickly move under enemy fire, take an advanced position, and start shooting. Even better, you can outflank enemies fingers in the nose. And that’s exactly what you should do, because outflanked enemies in ME2 can’t do anything : they can’t handle it, they start panicking, and they die.

If you play with the Revenant, do not activate Adrenaline Rush when you start shooting. Activate it only when you lose your shields, and keep firing.

Why ? Because Adrenaline Rush slows down your rate of fire, which is not really interesting with the Revenant (who cares about “lining the perfect shot” with such a gun ?). But the Hardened Adrenaline Rush grants you 50% damage reduction, which allows you to keep firing where other classes would have to get back to cover.

With other guns, mostly the Vindicator and the Mattock, Adrenaline Rush before shooting does wonders.

As soon as you see Armor, Barrier, or, even better, Health, use Reave to damage the protection and/or stun an enemy or a group of enemies. Then, fire.

You’ll mainly use the assault rifle. Sniper for the long range, is your assault rifle isn’t accurate enough. Pistol, only to deal with ammo issues. And the Shotgun, to take out an enemy quicker – especially with the Geth plasma Shotgun, with a medium / long distance charged shot.

That’s all for the Soldier. Here are some videos I recorded to show some Soldier gameplay on Insanity. But be careful of the spoilers !