Welcome to our NHL 22 HUT Deep Dive. We have a lot to get through so let’s get into it! First, we recommend checking out our HUT Deep Dive which goes into great detail on everything you can expect this year.

X-Factors are new items that start about 10 OVR lower than their base item but are upgradeable and will always match/exceed the highest OVR item of that player.

For example, Auston Matthews X-Factor starts as a 77 OVR since his base gold item is an 87 OVR. As the NHL season begins and Matthews increases in overall through our live content drops, the X-Factor item will unlock new tiers that you are able to upgrade with coins, collectibles, or sometimes even their base gold item. This allows X-Factor players to always keep up with the latest releases and be someone who you can keep on your team throughout the entire year.

X-Factor players also have customizable synergies that unlock at certain tiers. This allows for increased flexibility for whichever synergies your team utilizes. You can also refund half the coins or collectibles you used to upgrade the X-Factor item in case you no longer have room for them on your team. An X-Factor item is untradeable unless it’s set to tier 1 to avoid the possible confusion of 10+ different overalls for the same player being listed on the auction house.

This upgrade system is also reflected with Icon Upgrade items. Every month you will be able to upgrade select Icons.

Each X-Factor will have an Ability Limit limit tied to it ranging from 1-10 points. You may have to deactivate a certain zone or superstar ability to stay under the ability limit. This is to ensure proper balance as some of these abilities can be pretty powerful! The Ability Points limit may increase over the year allowing you to have more abilities in your lineup.

For NHL 22 we have decided to remove Team Synergies and change all synergies to just being Player synergies. We felt that Team building in HUT was too centered around team synergies and caused users to get into situations where they would be forced to blow up their entire team to change a player or two.  

In other situations players felt like they couldn't play with their favorite players unless they had the exact team synergy they needed like distributor. Without team synergies and with the addition of customizable synergies for some player items, this should really alleviate the need to blow up teams for synergies and allow users to choose players based on who they like and their playstyle rather than just their synergy.

Synergies this year are balanced in a way to help promote team play and puck possession over just a run and gun play style.

When looking at synergy boosts you'll rarely see any of the top attributes stacked together on a synergy this year, such as speed and shooting. In the cases that there is a bit of an overlap, the rest of the attributes are tuned in a way that still keeps them on par with the others. So there will be a lot of give and take for which synergies and boosts you decide to go for.

Synergies are assigned to player items almost opposite to how the new abilities are. We want synergies to help boost player items in some of their weaker areas. Although everyone thinks of McDavid and speed together, it doesn't really make sense to give him even more speed since he’s already a step or two ahead of everyone. With how HUT player progression works throughout the year this would lead to more player items hitting 99 early and throwing off the balance of their stats

The only exception is really faceoffs where if the player’s faceoff stats are too low, a boost won’t even matter and just be a wasted boost to the player. So we try to find players that could use a small boost to keep them viable in faceoffs. Like bumping faceoffs from the high 70s to low 80s

Based on your feedback we’ve switched to a more win-based reward structure for HUT Champions. The top 100 will still be points based but players outside the top 100 will be able to view and work towards rewards based directly on the number of wins they get over the weekend.

For Squad Battles we’ve added a few new things beginning with the ability to refresh your opponents whenever you’d like. This avoids you having to log in every 24 hours to play 4 games now you could hypothetically play all your squad battles games for the week in a single day. 

We’ve also allowed you to have the ability to set a custom period length between 2 and 4 minutes. If you’re trying to achieve the highest squad battles points we would suggest leaving it as is but if you need to complete a few objectives or want to get a quick game in before your friends log on you now have the flexibility to do that.

We know a lot of you have wanted to be the home team when playing squad battles so now before you enter the game it will randomize whether you are the home or away team.

We’ve also added a trade pile to help you better manage your items. After you open your pack you can assign up to 100 items to your trade pile. From here you can do things like compare price, put players on the auction house, or relist all expired auctions.

New to NHL 22 is the ability for sets to have specific OVR requirements. This allows us to build more intriguing events and not just rely on gold collectibles like previous years. It will also help your higher OVR players to maintain their value over the year as we will continue to create new ways for you to utilize the items in your collection.

Our first event during the EA Play window will be called Training Camp which is aimed at teaching new players the ins and out of HUT. The first official event will be called Superstar Origins which aims at celebrating the origin stories of some of the top NHL players!

The first master items will be Auston Matthews, Jaromir Jagr, Nick Suzuki, Seth Jones, Victor Hedman and Tuukka Rask.

There will also be two new types of live content items that you will see throughout the year in HUT called Star of the Month and Plays of the Year.

Star of the month will celebrate the top player of every month from the European leagues and the Plays of the Year will highlight the top plays as they happen throughout the year. These items will potentially get a larger OVR increase than a traditional Team of the Week or Primetime.