10-23-2019, 10:45 AMztevans Wrote:

10-23-2019, 10:15 AMMook Wrote: This would restrict the creativity of builds. Yes, rookies are advised that they shouldn't have defense as a weakness but that doesn't mean we should remove the possibility of having it as a weakness ever

It really wouldn't restrict much of anything from a creativity standpoint.  You can count on one hand the number of defense-weakness builds in the SHL, and all of them are inactive fillers averaging less than a minute per game (assuming they play at all).  Any player who stays active and starts with defense weakness eventually sees how damning it is and burns their free strength/weakness change on it.  I'm all for build variety and typically push against suggestions like "Kill the enforcer build!" but removing defense as a weakness would have zero impact on variety and would only make for better start-of-life experience for end users.

10-23-2019, 11:09 AMWannabeFinn Wrote:

10-23-2019, 10:15 AMMook Wrote: This would restrict the creativity of builds. Yes, rookies are advised that they shouldn't have defense as a weakness but that doesn't mean we should remove the possibility of having it as a weakness ever

Having low defense doesn’t make your build creative, it just makes it bad. It isn’t like Checking, Fighting, Faceoffs, Scoring/Passing/Skating balance. Attributes that actually make your build creative and distinct.

There comes a point where no builds are creative when you have enough TPE, sure, creativity is dead at 2000 TPE. A lot of players now are recreates, so they go the route of having defense as either a strength or a regular stat because that's what performs. People want to make it into the top 10 for scoring, they want to put up big numbers because that is the only thing that reflects the work they put in. This doesn't mean that we have to eliminate an entire possibility of someone with a goal of making a 800-1300 TPE players that allows for some build creativity. You can still get 85 defense with it as your weakness, it doesn't make you a useless player.

Why not add in another choice for weaknesses that have defense as an option such as Offensive forwards being able to choose between "Checking/Defense/Strength" or Playmaker "Checking/Defense/Scoring" Since scoring can't be a strength on a playmaker forward, same with a sniper and Passing.

I don't think the vision should be on restricting builds, but allowing more freedom