WOC Goalies are BAD!

Respectfully, I dont watch you play right so I cant tell you specifically whats going on for you but last year when I did play defense I played with 91 speed against guys with 95-96 speed and didnt have an issue, when I knew guys had that kind of build (and yes it happened often) I wouldnt be aggressive as a defender in the offensive zone, if the wingers played high on me I would tell my team to keep it low because I was covered and when there was loose pucks I was retreating into the neutral zone before anyone even had possession. Very few times when I played defensively minded did I get beat for a breakaway but I trusted that if I was being guarded my team could beat the other 4 on 4 or 3 on 3 if both wingers played high on the defense. It was a chess game, if you play high, my forwards are gonna play 3 on 3 down low, if you went low my team would utilize the defense more for those D to D 1T shots or shot for tips. Its all a strategy change when you know what your opponent is doing through out the game.

That being said, unfortunately the NHL doesnt track breakaway goalie %'s but this is what I found:

and overall I find that to be relatively accurate. If you give up breakaways its a coin flip. Thats just how it is. However if youre talking about AI defenders I do think the default AI needs to be tuned, they dont hustle back and they get burned very easily. I know in the settings for clubs you can adjust their sliders inside of team matchmaking strategies but 1. you can only do that in your own club, and 2. if you play any other mode there is no way to change that and that is frustrating. Its also not a fix were looking for but it can make it slightly better. Good luck.

I love how the response is always play better d. It's hard to do when your D has the speed agility and acceleration of a fat girl chasing a twinkie. There's like a 5 pt gap between defense and offense that's capped. Add wheels and it's dumb. Then add pressure cause why not. The game is un balanced sorry but it is. Been this way for years and it's never going to change. They definitely need to up the ai difficulty for goalies there suppose to be nhl pros not pee wee Tendys.

Join a discord like Byfuglin’s NHL26 Community, at the very least you can get rid of AI defenders. 

https://discord.gg/eashl

it sucks that the AI defense is abysmal bad. You can try adjusting their sliders but I think that’s only for clubs if I remember correctly. Discord is going to be your best bet currently, at least for world of chel. 

Yeah, that long winded paragraph doesn't make the fact that if you can't find defensemen to play with or the fact that you'd rather play with AI defense than worry about possibly getting trolls on defense any better.  Sometimes you can't find people to play defense and others you get defensemen who refuse to actually play defense, its bad enough we still don't have a kick feature for those people, but then watching AI defense get burned every single time is awful only to watch the AI goalie get beat on the same exact moves they got beat on last year that we begged to have fixed.

Not every team is lucky enough to have human  defenders. We have 2 or 3 players and ai defenders are useless against speed machines. And when everytime forehand backhand goes it is just quite bad gaming experience. 

Ofc if we let 10 breakaways couple should go in but atm is 10/10 every game. 

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. 

- 406

I agree a million percent. Where all tired of it. 💯 offense. D suffers agian this year. Stick em up , wheels second win. Plus pressuse ugh it's not fun...

Indeed. It's 100% goal with forehand backhand. Just takes away all fun and  after 2 nights of playing I don't feel like playing anymore. What a disappoinment. 

But this is unacceptable. It wasn't even this bad last year.

Been this way since at least 14. Sorry to say it's just not a priority - Some users believe this is done on purpose to force teams to have a human goalie (though that is a whole other can of worms entirely), while others don't think there is anything wrong with em and you just need to play better defense.