Some "good" X-Factors do literally nothing. (Proof)

I feel a big problem is that the dekes are “forced animations”. By this I mean that when we start a deke, there is a set path for the puck and skater based off of the factors of their speed and direction. This means that there is no way to alternate the aggressiveness of those dekes. You can’t one touch further up or shorter down on the right stick to modify the skaters deke angle and therefore, their final location. So a deke like the between the legs, would require you to be at a moderate speed in 24, or it would fail as the puck would miss their stick. The way to change this would be to have multiple endpoints based on where we aim our right stick when the deke is performed as mentioned above.

 The next problem than becomes that if a skater is in ANY part of its path, there is no logic for them to account for this while performing the deke and so the puck bounces off a skaters stick thats mid hip check or something similar. This aspect however, MAY BE FIXED  with the new reactive actions! Now we might have that logic when performing dekes so the skater adjusts their pathing based on the state of the defenders stick and skates. If this does happen, deking can get a massive buff to it and I am all for seeing dekes be more successful again.

A third problem to dekes is regarding the state a player is in when performing the deke. Dekes that separate the puck from the carrier (like a one touch, windmill etc) cause the skater to go in a “non possession” state. During this short window of time, they don’t have “control of the puck” and therefore, are immune to tripping calls (except for animations like dive and shot block). So when you go to perform the one touch and your skate incidentally comes in contact with another’s skate or stick, it causes the deke to fail when really they should be getting tripping calls. If you can get body checked when the skater is in this state, why can’t the skater draw a trip?

NitroXIIII am glad I’m not the only one labbing all this stuff like a mad man in practice mode. Keep doing what you’re doing! 

NitroXIIII just want to say people like you are great. Really love that you're digging into this stuff to give us more information. 

IMO, "Ankle Breaker" is pretty much useless for in-game situations and should be retooled to work like a "Crosby badge." What I mean by this is that it should improve a player's ability to hard-cut 180 degrees in the opposite direction (a la Crosby famously breaking MacKinnon and others' ankles in the corners) while carrying the puck. It should allow a player to do this a few times in a row. 

The following would require some work and alterations to the skating engine but might be interesting to read: you could make it so that these 180-degree cuts are an actual skill that players have an attribute for. With the existence of a stat like this, you could then have attribute thresholds where if a player has a low enough stat, repeated cuts back and forth would result in the player losing balance and stumbling (getting their ankles "broken"). The final result would be a player with the ankle breaker badge doing what the badge's name means: excellent cuts that cause the opposing player to stumble if they try to keep up.

I hope at least someone takes the time to read this!

Hi there. Thanks for going through all the testing. For Puck on a String, there's a 7% boost for the Superstar ability and a 10% boost for the XF. We are looking into this though thanks to the clip you provided. I'll update when I have some news.

For your Ankle Breaker test, did you test this at top speed?

In regards to the Shutdown description, it's actually on rush chances. The WoC description is incorrect.

Been asking for clearer, more definitive, "explain it to me like I'm 5", explanations for all skills/traits for years now - Didn't even think to compare cpu and human only aspects of them.

Lol people already min/max their builds so I don't see why they want to bottleneck us just for the sake of it

Thanks for your comparison and review!

I too think it would be good for EA to make an official guide to skills and abilities. That is, how to use them correctly and in what cases. Because at the moment our experience of use is only based on the description of these skills.