WOC Goalies are BAD!

Honest question, why are you letting players get in tight on a goalie? You gotta play defense my guy. I’m not saying goalies don’t need improvements but come on, keep shots as far away from the goalie as possible. How many times do you see breakaways in the NHL, maybe a handful in a 60 minute game. And we’re out here giving up 8 breakaways in a 12 minute game. Don’t go for hits at the blue line, that’s not real hockey. Play bend but don’t break, skate back with the offensive player, slow down the rush, stay inside the circles and cut them off when they try and jam the post, when they slow down use the poke check since at that point them slowing down will help make sure you don’t get torched, allow your teammates to get back and assist you, keep skaters to the outside (sharp angles) and if they cut into the slot that’s when you lay them out with a hit. Defense is just as important in winning games. This mentality of goalies need to save shots in tight needs to change and team defense needs to become a priority otherwise not a single team would be consistent.

Now with that little rant out of the way, I whole heartedly believe that the base goalie builds can’t keep up with abilities. AI goalies are built with a standard hybrid build, no changes to the attributes and no abilities. This means that they get no boost or counter against the abilities that user skaters get. If this makes sense, then the community should realize this puts AI goalies at a severe disadvantage beyond the standard breakaway, 1on1 situation. Powerful shots are going to treat these builds as if they are peewee goalies seeing a nhl player take a shot at them. They just don’t even see the puck coming, the reactions are slow naturally and then throw on something like a screen and youre just praying it hits the goalie based on good positioning and not a goalie actually reacting well to a shot. There are a few solutions that come to mind but none that I think would make everyone happy as a community. First the base goalie build should be able to react to all shots should that are within decent positioning ESPECIALLY wrist/snap shots. The main way to score on a goalie has always been to “make the goalie move” so imo getting sniped should not happen very often and should almost never happen from a shot outside of the face off dots. Secondly, skill based one times should really be skill based. I shouldn’t be able to hold L2 and hold up and get a skill based one timer just because I’m sitting there with my RS held up waiting. I don’t even think it should be hitting up on the RS during a pass, a skill based 1T should only be hit by pressing up when and only when the puck gets to you. On top of that, in order to hit a slap shot 1T (over a snapshot 1T) you should have to hold the stick back as a wind up otherwise it should always be a snap shot 1T and not a auto slap shot 1T. Back on the goalie themselves, if youre not gonna make the base goalie build able to realistically stop the majority of ability boosted shots then goalies should be allowed 5 ability slots to cover the potentially 15 different abilities they see on the 5 different skaters they see in a 6s game. In the standard NHL main game, most teams have around 3 skaters with 1 or 2 abilities and alot of them are on different lines which means that goalies can isolate 1 specific player. However, in WOC, every single player is running a build with at least 1, sometimes 2 elite abilities, that’s a possible 10 elite abilities to try and keep track of. And as a last option and probably the least favorite of most people would be to limit skaters to a single ability, this would cause a wide variety of builds to be used on what people deem most important to them and you may or may not see as many shooting attributes on less common scoring positions such as a elite 1T on D because Stick ‘Em Up would be preferred. However, I realize that last recommendation would probably not go over well with the skating community. 

Regardless, those are both my thoughts on defense as a community issue as well as what I truly wholeheartedly believe is the reason goalies both AI and user have issues and some of my reasonable to more extreme suggestions of how to bring the game to a more realistic respectful aspect. 

I wish you all the best of luck on the ice this year and whatever happens, I’ll see you on the ice. 

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