NHL 26 needs some changes...

The skating attributes in WOC have always been,  by far, the most important attributes in most builds.   Outside of a couple of the prebuilds, Wheels was never available.   Elite Edges became such a must-have X-Factor that the devs removed it last year ( again, outside a couple of the prebuilds ).

I don't know what else the devs could have expected by adding Wheels, re-introducing EE and allowing a good number of builds to push their skating attributes to 97 on top of those X-Factors.   In my small sample size of games so far it certainly hasn't resulted in more variety of player builds.  It's an arms race, and even as a more defensively inclined player you're almost forced to pump up those skating attributes to the maximum and use these X-Factors to keep up.

There needs to be some serious reconsidering of some of these X-Factors and the allowed attribute ranges, otherwise NHL 26 is just going to be track-meet hockey in WOC.