NHL 12: Less is more?

In most games typically if you have a higher number in an attribute or skill it is better. 18 strength is better than 17, level three hacking is better than level two, and higher shot power is better than lower shot power. Well in the NHL series sometimes down is up.

Shooting attributes have always been kind of wacky in the NHL series. One year having a lower accuracy was better. If you turned your accuracy up you started ringing pucks off of iron in no time. Last year the dev team said they tweaked accuracy to matter more but by the end of the year I was running a 90 wrist shot power and 80 accuracy and having a lot of success. It still seemed like the high shot power and low accuracy setup was the way to go.

Fast forward to this year. I am slowing getting points every 5 or 10 games and building up my attributes on my power forward. As I get to around 85 power and 75 accuracy on my wrist shot I am starting to score a lot more often. I keep adding points over more games and adding strength as well and before I know it I am sitting at 90 power and 80 accuracy and 90 strength. At this point I am almost back to where I was the year before and figure I should be scoring a lot. However now I am shooting too high a lot and scoring a lot fewer goals. As an example of how bad it got I managed to shoot the puck over the net from two feet outside the crease using a flat stick curve.

Needless to say I was rather irritated at these results. So I adopted a back to basics approach. I swapped to playmaker and balanced out my shots as much as possible. My wrist shot is 75 for both power and accuracy and my slapshot is 75 accuracy and a meager 57 power. With those shots* I had a great night last night even scoring a game winning goal in OT by sniping a shot over the goalies left shoulder from just outside the hash marks. One other highlight was a slap shot one-timer from around the left dot/left hash marks.

Once again EA has flipped the importance of attributes. Aside from my own experience, I am reading about and talking with other people who are even using lower power and higher accuracy with good results. So if you are like I was last year (high power low accuracy) flip those attributes around or knock them down a bit if you aren't scoring like you think you should. Sometimes less is more.

Note: This may not apply to defensemen and slapshots.

*This is basically the build I used. 5'9" 175lbs, 11 inch skates, regular flex, and second lowest stick curve.