My main issue with the arcane soldier was just that I played a previous game with a regular soldier, and the regular soldier could do everything the arcane soldier could, and could do it better. It wasn't that the arcane soldier wasn't still a powerful and effective class, he just didn't seem to get much to make up for what he lost compared to the soldier.
But….I was using flame strike instead of frost strike. It's possible that my opinion would have been different if I had been using frost strike. The problem with flame strike was that it required a huge skill point investment and that most of the time bleeding strike was much better. The only time I was happy to have flaming strike was against plants, or sometimes against undead. But it was so expensive in power points that you couldn't use it too often even when it was good.
I believe Flamestrike is balanced that way because at higher levels it can really rack up the Burning damage over time, so against Vegetal enemies or other enemies that are susceptible to Burning, it can be quite effective.
Frost Strike is really good for us. It is one of the most effective attacks we have. While it doesn't do a ton of raw damage, the Freeze status effect is priceless when an enemy is able to be frozen! Stay tuned for future episodes that showcase this much more.
The Bloody Strike is interesting, too, but I'll talk more about this in future posts when my Let's Play reaches that level. I would say it's worth a peek, for sure.
Soldier seems fine as well. However, they can't do quite the amount of things an AS can do, as they sacrifice a lot of versatility for potential melee damage. The AS has the elemental attacks and magic usage as well, but the Soldier does have access to the same status-ailment melee attacks, which is nice. While it is more expensive to train spells for an AS than it is for a Wizard, having another party member that can cast spells is a very nice thing to have. If you want maximum versatility, have extra gold to spend on training and give her the skill point herbs, it can be very nice, indeed.
I have much more to say about the Arcane Soldier and other aspects of the classes but my LP has not caught up to my actual game-time yet. Let's just say that when the AS starts equipping some devastating weapons and has some of her elemental attacks further developed, it gets very interesting.
Also, for the Deepest Dark run, I use a Barbarian/Paladin/Thief front line. I was going to go with a Soldier but I used the random character generator and it came up a Paladin, which sounded interesting so I went with it. Speaking of which, the random character generator is pretty freaking cool. It obviously randomizes the characters but it also has a sort of "balancing" factor built into it, in that it tries to mix up the amount of melee and magic users in a "balanced" way. Play with it a bit and you'll see what I mean. It also adds the factor of having to adapt to somewhat randomized starting conditions and possibly exploring different synergies and builds that you might have not created yourself. Pretty neat.
