CHEL small and fast backhand meta. So disappointed.

No matter how much they slow the skaters down there will still always be builds that are the fastest.  And the way EASHL has worked for several years now is that speed is king, and so speed remains king.

I think there's ways they could make flat-out speed more balanced:

• It should be trivial to knock the puck away from skaters hustling down the ice with only one hand on their stick.  Poke checks, body contact, the boards, etc should cause them to lose the puck.  But right now that puck is glued onto their stick as if they're not skating flat out.
  • On a similar note, skaters in full-out hustle should have less agility and be easier to knock over or off the puck.
• Make a slight delay between exiting the hustle animation and allowing the player to pass or shoot the puck.  Not a huge delay, but there should be something to reflect the time needed to get the second hand on the stick and settle the puck.
• Push stamina reduction even further for players skating at full hustle.
• ( This will never happen, but.... ) Personally, I'd love to see a change back to the NHL 16 days where builds were fixed and all of the skating attributes were the same for all builds.  The differentiators were things like shooting for snipers, passing for playmakers, etc.  It allowed for defensive or physical builds to be more viable because they could keep up with everyone else.  I know this idea is wildly unpopular, but for all the "I want to be able to customize my build my way" talk there just seems to be an endless ocean of min-size, max-speed builds out there.

The goalies are Swiss cheese

The overall speed of the game was a bit too fast in years prior, but slowing the entire game down as a whole isn't the fix because the actual issue was the forwards were so insanely fast that it completely limited what styles of play you could realistically play.

At the more competitive club level, you couldn't really be a big, shutdown, physical defenseman because the 5'7 160lb 95 speed gold elite edges forwards could just run straight past you. So, if you wanted to keep up, you HAD to use a small PMD build with maxed out speed and agility. This came at the cost of defensive abilities, because even though forwards could be great at shooting, passing, and quickness simultaneously, defensemen had to pick which area we were gonna suffer at, statistically speaking. Most of us chose to be as quick as possible and be able to move the puck up easier. As a result,  games looked like roller hockey games where there was VERY LITTLE physicality at all, and as a result the forwards knew it didn't matter how big they were because nobody was going to be doing much hitting at all.

I think there should be some changes to the individual positions. EA did get rid of the speed and agility boosts TECHNICALLY, but they also made it so that you can get to 95 speed/acceleration/agility WITHOUT any boosts, so it really doesn't change anything. There needs to be more variety in builds, which means that forwards need to be limited in how many things they can be great at, because right now they have every single tool needed to dominate on offense while defensemen and goalies are left with nothing. 

94 defensive awareness + gold quick pick + good positioning should at LEAST be able to break up this play, and yet...

(20-second mark):

 https://www.xbox.com/play/media/UqwkfaLLvv

https://www.xbox.com/play/media/ENXkDYvS4N

But, this is EA, so they're not going to change anything. Forwards will be allowed to constantly bee line and force every pass through. 

I don't really know how one can make a *slow* d-man this year (to certain extent), but true the offensive players will still be faster. Besides, you can make sniper that can both shoot and skate really well, so...

I think it was a mistake to give the extra points in certain categories, because now it's super easy to make a speed demon. Instead of giving more points to use, you should have less points, and the attributes should matter more, so that you'd really have to think where you use them. 

In last year's game, you dropped all values as much as you could to put everything to acceleration and speed. Then you chose some x-factors and you were good to go. The other values didn't seem to matter at all.

This year, you even get bonus points to use... how's that going to work out?

As a goalie, I feel completely helpless so far, I play positionally but just cant react in time, the skaters can deke/stick handle left and right so quickly , much faster then the goalie animations to keep up. Ive tried big builds, small ones to no avail, and if you have a average d pair, look out. Not enjoyable at this point in net. I feel like im tending a net in FIFA then chel

Hi there. Can you get some video of this? It would be good to see what your defense is doing. I've mostly been playing WoC and haven't been seeing a lot of breakaways. I also play pretty conservative D and tend not to cross the blue line unless all opposing players are deep enough in their zone.

EA_Aljosaid that game speed has been reduced. They got lots of feedback. 

I agree with that the game is still too fast. The speed should be reduced even more, why?

This is hockey and its team game. It would be nice to have more passing in the game. Situations should be built trough passing. More realism to the game please. If you create smallest player, its fine but small players should be much weaker = you lose puck easily. Then all 5 players cant be smallest players what you can create in CHEL.

One thing you could also change in CHEL. Forwards should play with forward builds. Defenders should play with defender builds.  Now there have been many nhl versiosn  where 90% of the players are playing with puck moving defenceman. 

I would like to see a reorganization of how attributes are grouped together to account for better balancing the speed go brr meta. For example, you can have high speed/acc but at the cost of low agility/deke/shot. 

Or maybe balance the skating stats for each build instead of basing on player height and weight. Like a PWF with 90 speed would be equivalent to a PLY with 88 speed.  Again this takes into consideration that high speed for a build comes at a cost of other attributes. NHL 16-20 had a great balance of builds. If we can get back to that with the option of customization that would be great tbh.