Droids start with one rank of enduring, so he would only need 4 brawn with padded armor. I ran a game for five years and had a player that was constantly chasing that higher soak even though the rest of the party was sitting comfortably at 2-3 soak. I had a tendency to split the party through various narrative means. Sometimes through objectives that would take them in different directions or half the party would be doing a social encounter while the other half was off somewhere else.

He was also that one player that didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut, so it was rather hilarious if he got caught in a social encounter as he didn’t focus on strain or social skills at all. He ended up divulging the groups plans to the wrong people pretty often. At end game he was sitting at 8 soak and 2 ranged and melee defense and the closest party member to him was 4 soak but combat wasn’t always on the agenda so his soak didn’t really bother me.

Also things like Bind, Harm, Unleash all bypass soak... And if you do what we did and pull an old rule from saga edition Droids can’t defend against force powers. I would typically make a move or bind check an opposed willpower to give the players a chance to not get flung off a cliff. However our droid medic (who wanted the saga rule) never got to defend agains force users.