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Soul Blaze
Any unit that takes at least one unsaved wound from a weapon with this special rule is Soul Blazed. At the end of the player turn, they must take a leadership check. If passed, there is no effect and the unit no longer counts as being Soul Blazed. If failed, the unit takes a single wound with no armour or cover saves allowed and continues to be Soul Blazed
Thoughts?

Sounds good. Another idea that me and my friends use:
* To Wound rolls of 6 made by weapons with this special rule generates one bonus attack which hits automatically. These bonus attacks may generate further bonus attacks.

Just less book-keeping while maintaining the aspect of "OH MY GOD I'M ON FIRE!"

Less dice rolling, which I like.

I wonder if it is too weak on hordes and too nasty on elites.

The existing rule could be streamlined however, e.g.

Take d3 S4 AP5 hits, if no unsaved wounds caused in this way then remove the counter.

But, just to make it more interesting and useful: How about this:

Any unit with a soul blaze counter suffers a -1 penalty to cover saves.

I dunno, it still feels a bit useless as it still does next to nothing to Hordes, and as most Elite units have a really good Ld value it has less of an effect against them.

Probably better than the current version, though.

It'd be cool if for Soul Blaze was kinda like Tesla, and have it so that every successful To Hit roll of a 6 with a Soul Blaze weapon causes the enemy unit to suffer an additional 2 (or D3, but 2 means less rolling) S4 AP5 hits with the Ignores Cover special rule. Removes the book keeping, the rolls-upon-rolls-upon-rolls and makes it more worthwhile.

Here's a variation, cobbled together out of some of the other ideas here:

Soul Blaze: A unit that suffers any unsaved wounds from a weapon or model with the Soul Blaze special rule gains a Soul Blaze token. At the end of each player turn, each unit with a Soul Blaze token suffers 2 S4 AP5 hits with Ignores Cover; if the unit suffers no unsaved wounds the fire is extinguished and the Soul Blaze token is removed. If the unit suffers an unsaved wound from these hits, the token remains.

Now, fluffwise, it should probably do something else in close combat, maybe stop you from firing Overwatch, etc, but that gets harder to balance and there's a crapload more bookkeeping.

Here's my ruling. Note that a unit can and will have multiple Soul Blaze Tokens placed on it, making it a very deadly tool to have.

Soul Blaze
If a unit suffers one or more unsaved Wounds from an attack with this special rule, it is set ablaze and continues to burn – mark it with a coin or counter for each unsaved Wound as a reminder. At the end of each turn, roll a D6 for each unit with Soul Blaze counter(s). On a 2 or less, the flames die out and the unit is no longer ablaze – remove your reminder counter(s). On a 3+, the unit takes D3 Strength 4 AP5 hits with the Ignores Cover special rule for each counter on the unit. These Wounds are Randomly Allocated.

If you want to deal with hordes, then how about you suffer the wounds equal to the number over your leadership that you rolled.

What about this,

Soul Blaze;
A unit with a soul blaze token (assigned as per current rules) takes a leadership test at the end of each player turn and suffers a number of wounds at S4 AP5 with the ignores cover special rule (or maybe that of the weapon used) equal to the difference between the roll and their leadership. If the roll was equal to or less than their leadership the blaze dies out and has no effect in future turns, if the roll was greater than their leadership they continue to be set ablaze. Units with soul blaze tokens cause fear (they're on freaking FIRE) but also suffer a -1 modifier for all pinning, morale, and psychic tests.

Replace the soul blaze rules with ones from deflagerate.

For each unsaved wound that is suffered from a weapon with this rule resolve an equal number of hits immediately with the same profile as the original profile against the affected unit. Note that these additional hits cannot trigger the ability again and cause more hits.

As it currently stands Soul Blaze is more work than rewarding to keep track of. Instead how about instead the mechanic becomes interesting and say being marked with soul blaze causes other flamer template and soul blaze weapons to count as having +1 strength and -1 AP. Soul Blaze lasts until the end of the shooting player's next turn. No idea if this would be balanced in the slightest but it would make it worth keeping track of.

Considering the places I mostly see soul blaze (mandrakes, grey knight powers, and Tzeentch stuff), I feel like it would be just fine if you could put multiple soul blaze counters on a unit. So each time a new unit inflicts damage on an enemy, that enemy gains an additional soul blaze token. Tzeentch and grey knight armies will have enough sources of soul blaze to make use of this, and mandrake MSU is both awfully cheap and surprisingly durable. This rule wouldn't really take much more time to resolve (you'd be rolling more dice, but it's the same number of steps), and it lets you stack on more extra damage. Heck, if you really layered on the soul blaze tokens, you might even get lucky and start whittling away at durable death stars by sheer volume of bonus wounds from soul blaze.

Sort of off-topic, but some sort of special wargear or psychic power to boost soul blaze (like tzeentch powers being more effective against soul blazed units) could be cool too.

How about making it a stacking ability?

For each wound allocated to a unit by a weapon using soul blaze place a token next to the unit. At the end of the current player turn roll a D3 for each token on that unit, the unit suffers that many Str 4 AP- hits that ignore cover. The tokens are then removed.

This way there is very little bookkeeping to worry about, it has some punch against hordes and it's a way to attempt to force lots of extra saves on more elite infantry or even a MC. Since the extra wounds happen at the end of the player turn the affected unit won't lose any effectiveness until the turn is over which makes for some interesting dynamics of play. As a Tzeentch player this would actually go a long way to make thousand sons worth their points. AP3 bolters for immediate punch but the soul blaze helps them deal with swarms too or stack extra wounds on big meanies. The more wounds means the more fire you would suffer making it a potent ability. I don't know many other units that use soul blaze so I'm looking at this in a bit of a vacuum but I don't feel this version is OP at all on a thousand son, considering how expensive he is and for the same points other armies get some real nasty elite infantry.

Thematically I like the idea of pumping soul blaze rounds into a MC on overwatch as he charges me. The rounds fail to kill him but after the combat has been resolved he suffers the fire affect and burns to death, but not before the big beasty ran into my unit and ripped a few to shreds.

If it does a market per wound incinerator purifiers become ridiculous versus hordes, 4 templatest +2d6 hits will go insane for wounds. Leading to like 20 d3 s4 hits ignores cover. Can you say remove your whole 30 gaunt unit from one shooting attack.

That's what I was worried about, my suggestions while reasonably balanced for a thousand sons unit would be far too powerful on a different unit. It almost seems like soul blaze needs different rule sets based on what unit is using it. Sadly the only thing that is clear at this point is that soul blaze as a USR is woefully underwhelming and in most cases not even worth the bookkeeping required to run it.

Soul blaze gives the model the Melta and Shred rule.

non-vehicle models hit by a Soulblaze weapon/model must pass a Initiative test, if the test is succesfull nothing happens, if it fails the model loose 1 Wound with no saves allowed.

Any roll of a 6 to wound generates another hit.