I completely agree with you. Late hits need to be called more strictly. That clip you posted is egregious.
Im punished by losing half of my stamina (didn’t realize it wasn’t shown in the clip) for making the correct play of passing the puck off to a teammate instead of holding on to it and having more options to avoid the hit with a deke or attempting to reverse hit them.
As a side note, extended charge times on hip checks should give penalties in the form of clipping (real NHL penalty) the same way elbowing calls do with extended charge timed body checks.
This is why the "charge up" system is dumb. First off, it often results in an elbow being stuck out way before the hit takes place, secondly they often go down into a hip check form long before a hit takes place. Neither one makes sense, because they pretty much stop everything else to focus only on the hit. This forces you to either, never hit, or be so focused on the hit you no longer maintain positioning. Players do not go into any kind of hitting position until right before a hit IRL, otherwise they wind up with penalties, or an earful from a coach. In the game, if you do not prime your hit, the hit is so weak it wasn't worth doing. This is far from realistic and seems like a ridiculous thing to add to the game, I understand and support all the requests to remove the "priming hits" and go back to the old style of hitting from 23 or earlier.
Community ManagerPersonally, it feels more realistic when using the skill stick controls with the mechanic of flicking the stick down and then up. Like you do with slapshots.
I do like the hitting mechanic. I will say that sometimes it feels like my player gets sucked into a hit when I'm initiating a bodycheck, tho, and often times it puts my player in a position where I'm getting a weak hit to my opponents shoulder instead of the chest. I'm not sure if that's the hit assist that's causing that or what.
Hitting is an issue, but its because of the animations blocking certain aspects of it and the boost. In your example, my argument to this is don't start charging your hit so early. Hitting is supposed to be a skill like one timers in a way. This is how they balanced it as a risk/reward move and how they made the Elbowing penalty less RNG based while being more human error focused. If you start your charge too early, than you are more likely to take a penalty. If you start too late, than you won't finish the animation of the hit at the correct point of contact and will potentially whiff the hit. The timing has to be pretty good. This was a good change and adds again a risk/reward in the form of a huge punishment for whiffing/mistiming your hit vs a big body check designed to drop even the bigger players. Which is why as I said, I would love to see something similar done with Hip Checks in the form of Clipping penalties.
The only problem with the hit animation is in regards to the speed burst you get from it (hopefully adjusted for 25) and the deking aspect where you try to deke around a checking player, but the puck ends up hitting their stick while they are in the hit animation by nothing more than pure luck.
OH and I agree that hitting on skill stick feels way better than hitting using buttons on total control... which you can choose to use the right stick for as well on Total.
