Newbie Guide to NHL 12

So you just popped in your NHL 12 disc and are itching to get into some EASHL or OTP (Drop In) action but you have no idea where to spend your meager points. I will attempt to help make that decision easier.

Since you start off with very few points you need to figure out what to put them in and what can be ignored (for now). As a forward here is what I did. I think the only choice early on is playmaker. The playmaker's base stats are almost good enough without adding anything to get by. What I did on offense was crank up puck control to about 90, deking to about 90, and offensive awareness to about 90. You could drop some points from deking or offensive awareness and throw them in pass or shot accuracy but I liked this setup. Even with the base 75 passing you can fire the puck around no problem. I would ignore hand eye and shot power at this point. Defensively, if you are on wing, get your discipline to 90, then put everything else in stick check. As a center dump everything into faceoffs and throw the rest into discipline. For athletics I think the most crucial thing is at least 75 in balance so you won't fall down easily and for the way I play 75 in endurance ignoring anything else. Now if you don't use hustle a lot (you really should) you can split out the rest of your points into speed/agility/acceleration trying to keep them fairly even. I suggest being no more than 6' 195 lbs and if you want more speed go 5'9" 175 lbs. Definitely use the 13" blades early on if you want to have a hope of keeping up. Use whatever stick you are comfortable with.

With this setup you are really going to be looking to use your quickness to get into open space with the puck and feed teammates. You can tap in one timers but you are not going to be lasering the puck in from all over the ice.

On defense I suggest defensive defenseman. The offensive stats are pretty bad and your best bet is probably just focusing on shot power, passing (70s), and hand-eye. On defense I would go discipline, stick check, defensive awareness, and then body check in that order. The defensive dman has very good defensive abilities to start so you can pick off some passes and have a pokecheck that doesn't totally suck. Athletically again balance at 75 then spread your points out how you like, if you play proper positional defense you shouldn't need a really high endurance. I would say stay around 6' 195 lbs for this build and maybe use the 13" skates but those do keep you from turning well so you might want to play around. I would also say stick to one of the lower two curves for your blade on defense since you want to keep your shots lower and have plenty of room to roof it from out at the point if you want to try that.

On defense you should be able to play a positionally sound game and pick off a lot of passes, make a decent outlet pass, and occasionally fire a one timer or lay someone out.

So there is your newbie guide for NHL 12. I will have some early impressions of NHL 12 later in the week.