Breaking down a 200 TPA VHLM Sniper build.

[Shindigs 1,771]

So I think we've all kind of come to realize VHLM builds are going to be pretty weak going forward. Even capped you will at best have SC and DF in the 60s, and that's about it. Alex put together some pretty solid ones, though I do disagree with the amount of skating and ph in them. Mostly because the way it was achieved goes against my personal design philosophy when making builds in the hybrid system. That obviously doesn't mean I'm right and Alex is wrong, it's simply two different approaches.

 

Mostly I'm just down with some illness and my brain is too mushy to do actual real work, so I'll just write this instead to keep me busy.

 

As I talked about in my other MS about the hybrid attributes, I basically follow a flow chart on how I approach making builds. Starting from the most important attribute (DF) and then extrapolating what the other connected attributes (SK, PH) should be based on that, and finishing off the build with as much SC and/or PA as will fit. If it's a center I'd also add in just enough Faceoff, but in the M you simply can't fit enough of that attribute to have a useful amount with the TPA available, so I'd just completely skip it until some point in the E. Because if no one can afford Faceoff, then everyone is equally bad and we're still coin flipping around .500

 

The whole symbiotic relationship between DF/PH/SK becomes weird at low TPA. There is no way around it. I'll assume we're not doing CK. Because DK gains from CK are so bad scaling wise that you basically don't even want it until around the 80s of DF (assuming you only want the DF, and don't care about the CK). Clearly you're not hitting 80 DF in the M anymore, so that's outside the scope of this article.

 

DF: Stick Checking > Defensive Coverage > Deking

SK: Speed > Defensive Coverage > Deking

PH: Stickhandling > Deking

 

Keeping in mind that the above are all the hybrid attributes (minus Body Checking, as mentioned) that affect our DF, SK and PH.

 

The second thing we have to realize is that DF has break points much like the old updating scale. But these values are not necessarily at apparent or obvious values, as you have it being affect by both the actual update scale AND the juggling of multiple hybrid attributes at once, with varying ratios. In practice for the M we have two "relevant" tiers. Up to and including 56 DF costs 4 TPE per DF, from 57 up to and including 69 cost either 5 or 6 based on the exact rounding of that DF value. We simply can't realistically afford to make a good build around 69 DF in the M, as that alone costs 138 TPA to achieve. My rule of thumb for mid/low TPA builds is that we can use roughly half our TPA for DF and still be able to make a functional build around that. That realistically means we are either going for 63 (105 TPA), 62 (99 TPA) or 61 (94 TPA) in a maxed 200 TPA VHLM build.

 

So with your DF choice having been basically made for us through the power of "Quicc Maffs". Let's pick 62 DF, because that is going to fit perfectly into our sniper build. That means we now have 101 TPA left to build the rest of our player. So how did we reach 62 DF as cheaply as possible?

 

62 DF : 70 Stick Checking, 29 Defensive Coverage, 0 Deking.

 

Since we have 0 Deking we already know that we will have little to no Puck Handling, that's just how it is. Our first points (5) in Deking won't come until we're hitting 70 DF (145 TPA). So unless you feel like only having 55 TPA left after adding your DF, that ain't happening chief! Even at 5 Deking we won't actually have much of any PH, so it's not like doing so would even help.

 

We do however have 29 Defensive Coverage, and as Defensive Coverage is the 2nd biggest contributor to SK. We should be getting at least some of that for free. So where does 29 Defensive Coverage land us, skating wise?

 

If we want to get technical, 28 Defensive Coverage lands us on 45 SK and 34 Defensive Coverage would land us on 46 SK. So we aren't perfectly on both a DF and SK break point. But if given the choice between getting as much DF vs. getting as much SK as possible. DF is the clear winner, so SK will just have to deal with it.

 

So I mentioned the symbiotic relationship getting weird at low TPE. I should probably explain why. Simply put in a vacuum both PH and SK are far too expensive to be worth getting. We already know getting 62 DF costs us 99 TPA, how much would 62 Skating cost in vacuum? Well, 111 TPA. Ouch! What about PH? 85 TPA, okay that is more manageable. Still with us knowing just how much better DF and SC are than SK and PH. That doesn't sound like a lot of bang for your buck. The key realization from before being that they all share hybrid attributes, if you already have a certain amount of DF. Then your Defensive Coverage (and later Deking) will cover most of the cost of SK. Just as your Deking will cover most of the cost of your PH, and since the 2nd attribute of PH is Stickhandling, which is the 3rd attribute of SK. It means that adding that Stickhandling to up your PH will make your SK's cost only come from the Speed portion of it. Since the other two parts (Defensive Coverage and Stickhandling) have already been paid for. But at low DF values we reach them with very little Defensive Coverage and no Deking, so we don't get them for free. Which simply means that pursuing them becomes super inefficient, and balancing them becomes a nightmare, as we'll explore below.

 

To make it a bit more concrete, we spent 99 TPA to get our DF to 62, same as before. This just so happened to also give us 45 SK, we paid 0 TPA for that skating. If we added 7 Stickhandling (106 TPA), then we'd get up to 46 SK. But if we're actively adding to SK, we really would rather up our PH to minimize the lost pucks to mishandling at high speed.

 

So how would we go about getting 46 PH with 7 Stickhandling? Well, as it turns out, we went up to 42 PH "for free" when we got those 7 Stickhandling to get our SK up to 46. But to close our gap we have to increase the only hybrid attribute that gives PH, but doesn't give SK, which is Deking. So let's get to work:

1. Increase Deking to 15 to reach 46 PH (121 TPA).

Now at this point some of you may or may not see the problem, namely that if you up your Deking, then you also up your DF. But wait DF is good, so upping DF is good! Except we now have too much Defensive Coverage for our DF value, meaning we're wasting a bunch of TPA to rounding.

2. Lower our Defensive Coverage to 19 (111 TPA).

But that means our SK is now down to 44, sigh.

3. Get 22 Stickhandling to fix that (126 TPA).

Oh come on, now our PH is 51. That's way too high!

4. Drop Deking to 0 (111 TPA).

Wait we still have 47 PH with 0 Deking? And now our DF is down to 60 and our build costs 111 TPA instead of 99. Did we just pay 12 TPE for 1 SK and 7 PH while losing 2 DF? Yes, we did. And guess what, those 2 points of DF are worth 11 TPE. So unless you value PH very highly, we just paid to get worse.

 

As we follow that wild ride of hybrid attribute juggling to its end we can see that, generally speaking, the more we try and fix our SK/PH at these low TPA values, the worse our build's efficiency becomes and the less we end up with. It just doesn't make sense to me. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge fan of 45SK and 40 PH. However the option to go for significantly more when you don't get enough Defensive Coverage and Deking "for free" by upping your DF, simply isn't feasible in my opinion. One of my stronger looking mid 500 TPA Sniper builds still only has 70 SK/PH for largely the same reason, you can only fit as much of those attributes as your DF will allow at a discounted price. And you can only fit as much DF as your TPA will allow without seriously hurting your SC/PA.

 

So with the reason why we can't have SK/PH beyond a very basic level hopefully somewhat clear to you, let's move on to the final step of our build, The scoring!

 

To recap, since our little adventure into actually getting SK/PH failed, we reverted back to our 45SK/62DF setup for 99 TPA. This leaves us with 101 TPE to get scoring as high as we possibly can. It just do happens to be that 65 SC costs 101 TPA, what a funny totally-not-at-all-planned coincidence!

 

65 SC: 75 Offensive Vision, 21 Slap Shot (200 TPA, 101 TPE Cost)

 

With that we even manage to get a small PA/SC gap going, something that isn't trivial to do at the VHLM level. The final build ends up looking like this:

 

If you absolutely feel like you have to have SK/PH we can actually make a different decision at Step 2 in our attempt at fixing our SK/PH above. If we instead increase our Defensive Coverage by 1. We increase our DF from 63 to 64 and end up with this, at the cost of losing 6 ST and 3 SC:

Now this just happens to have amazing rounding on its side, making something that generally speaking shouldn't work, actually work. But it does completely give up the SC/PA gap, which will be a deal breaker for some. I do think that especially as a Dman this build would probably be better overall, though as a winger I could certainly see the original version being better, as you don't need DF quite as much.

 

Hopefully you learned something. If not, then at least you have two more builds to potentially use as inspiration once the re-roll happens. I'll probably keep making these kinds of MS when I'm bored, likely with VHLE level (~300 TPE) builds next time. Though I make no promises.

[Ben 200]

I think my build guide is what people should use not your silly gibberish!

[Shindigs 1,771]

1 hour ago, Ben said:

I think my build guide is what people should use not your silly gibberish!

Still waiting for the store purchase guide!