CommunityFortress

Loaded's Jaeger was featured in a recent ubercharged.net article about competitive TF2.  Check out his tips on playing Soldier:

When doing these “long jumps” it is important to control your height so as not to take fall damage. This is a common mistake I see inexperienced competitive soldiers making.

There is also another jump which I suppose you might call a short jump. These are fast, low 27 damage rocket dashes. These are useful for catching up with your team, blocking capture points, denying health packs to enemies, accessing health packs which require a rocket jump when low on life, and chasing down a fleeing opponent.

In competition a soldier is often limited by his ability to kill before having to reload. Almost invariably you will kill someone and be rushed by an enemy scout while you’re weapons are empty. It is thus important to not overkill an enemy.

Make it a habit to use one rocket and one shotgun to kill unbuffed light classes and two rockets and a shotgun to kill unbuffed soldiers. After getting the kill with your shotgun switch back to your rocket launcher without reloading the shotgun until there is a lull in the action. A common mistake I see is for soldiers to only switch to their shotgun in desperate situations when they are caught without any rockets loaded. When switching from rocket launcher to shotgun make sure you press your key to switch to shotgun immediately after you fire your rocket, otherwise it will take too long to be able to shoot your shotgun and you might die or miss and easy kill shot while the enemy is recovering from the rocket hit.

Prefiring/spamming rockets at choke points or long range opponents is a common practice for soldiers and a good one. When doing this make sure to keep at least one rocket loaded to defend against unseen threats like scouts or spies.

Direct rockets do substantially more damage than splash rockets. When aiming at an enemy try to aim for the ground about a foot behind them. This will let you hit them directly and pop them up if you predict their movement correctly and if you miss slightly still give you good splash damage. A common mistake I see is people shooting rockets directly at the feet and allowing a mostly well-aimed rocket to fall just short of the enemy letting them get away with only splash damage taken instead of direct damage.

In general I try to fire one rocket and reload it before firing again if I’m shooting at targets that I’m not likely to immediately kill such as far away targets. You should note that a rocket finishes reloading before the animation of the reloading completes. Practice consistently firing one rocket as fast as possible after reloading it so you always have at least 3 ready for more immediate threats and opportunities.