need help intercepting passes
What do I have to do to intercept passes this year? In previous years intercepting passes worked very well. intercepting passes needs to be fixed. I have ninety-two defensive awareness and this happ...
Forum Discussion
I was playing D for more than 10 years but I stopped because defensive awareness currently means nothing to this game. Every year you are systematically destroying defense. My DD build with DA 94 equipped with gold Quick Pick X-Factor ability refuses to even move the stick to intercept the passes unless you are perfectly aligned with the puck recipient with your stick on the same side, but forwards that skate out of our D zone can intercept strong passes and quickly move their sticks to another side even if they are not watching the puck and are turned to the pass sender with their back just to be able to support that stupid pressure system. Forwards skate into defense with full speed utilizing LT without any drop of puck control and skating speed !!! As a D I can't even extend my stick without speed penalty. I can't even skate backwards keeping my stick extended without speed penalty. You can clearly see in many situations, that offense is favored over the defense and this is not what I want to see in competitive game. And the last thing, super annoying, those weird skating animations that everyone is utilizing to confuse the opponent and make body contact event worse because of animations. I mean player's body broken in the waist that even my cat cannot track that movements. That should be completely removed from the game.
EA_Aljo
Community Manager
Community ManagerI've been playing D since EASHL first started. More than 15 years ago at this point. Obviously, this position, along with the others, has changed a lot. What I've done is adapt. Yes, it's challenging. D is a difficult position to play well. It's most certainly not impossible though.
We all know that LT'ing is an exploit. Hopefully, it'll be addressed in the next game. Regardless, those players can be stopped. You have to be more careful about staying in front of them. Which, a good defender is going to do anyway because speed has always been the killer attribute. If you're beat by someone LT'ing, you'd probably also get beat without it.
I see the claims that offense is favored by our developers. It's really not. Offense is favored by the players. There are obviously more forwards than any other position. People want to be the star. And those players are typically the ones that score. Yes, they get a whole bunch of dekes at their disposal. Those don't really make a difference if they don't know how to use them. And, if they're going up against defenders that don't know how to stop them, they're going to have a field day. In the end, any forward can be stopped by skilled defenders. I'm not saying D couldn't use some changes. I absolutely think there's room for improvement. The changes that have been made though were not just to favor offense.
Hi EA_Aljo ,
thank you for your words, I fully understand what you are saying, I have adapted over the years, I would say, I'm playing decent D, but in my opinion, this game is not balanced properly. I'm in situation that I started to hate this game. But this is not for this discussion, but for another thread. Thank you.
- EA_Aljo
You're welcome! Feel free to start up another thread to discuss balancing between the builds.