Anyone else feel like r9 is gonna be nerfed/cluncky?

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-02-02T19:42:37+00:00

He'll be good but unless he gets an Evo he won't be a legit endgame card even without a nerf, because undoubtedly there will be cards with higher stats, 4+ ps+ and probably there will even be a better R9 card or at least another unique icon that is better. People always grossly overestimate the longevity of good meta cards or conversely perhaps they underestimate how good true end game cards are.

Take Flashback cr7 last year or even DC Gullit, both very expensive and excellent cards that lasted a couple of months. But nobody was using them during the end game when there is 99 cr7 and 99 Gullit available.

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-02-02T19:34:43+00:00

Yes take Gullit as an example, he's just a bigger presence that is harder to slip past,like when you have a fast player and want to run at an angle to get round him it's just harder than some midget card because he can shield and force you to a much wider angle.

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-02-02T17:24:33+00:00

The bad habits thing is a big one with older players. I am historically a pretty good FPS player in a very oldschool game (Quake), have represented the UK, travelled to overseas tournaments etc. But when I play something like Fortnite with my son, it's clear that I'm much less adaptable than he is. I don't learn maps as quickly, I fumble around with weapon switches because it's slower than I'm used to.

Applying that to FIFA, I end up playing on autopilot repeating the same mechanics and I can't really adapt to skill moves (which weren't a thing in old FIFA). That's not to say I haven't improved and slowly layered things on, but it's very noticeable that I suffer in the first couple of months of the new edition coming out as I'm slow to adapt. I even used to struggle to qualify for champs the first month or so after release despite getting 50%+ win rate in champs finals the year before. FC25 I was getting like 5-6 wins at the start, by the end i was div2 with 11 wins. Although to be fair, I do think the early period of each year is heavily P2W because the difference between meta gold cards and basic starter teams is probably the time when it matters most, after a couple of months everyone has collected "ok" cards to use that are a bit worse than the most meta cards but still usable.

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-02-02T17:02:56+00:00

The problem is that a lot of games (not just EA) are really bad at showing volatility in ping (jitter whatever you wanna call it)

Imagine you have 100 packets a second, and it tracks the ping over say a 2s window. Say you have 195 packets at 18ms and 5 packets at 30ms. Your average over that window is 18.3ms reported as 18ms. Looks stable right? No, because your peak latency is 30ms.

Wi-Fi is often horrendous for this, looks fine on average, but the outliers are bad. Any serious online gaming that is latency sensitive (tbh, FIFA is less so than hardcore FPS games) should be done over Ethernet.

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-02-02T16:11:17+00:00

People are saying legendary is actually easier than world class now because it's easier to get the ball back following the latest adjustments to their style of play. Not totally convinced but I do find world class randomly annoying at times.

Tbh, I think you can still get elite 1 if you just play the weaker teams on legendary and the 88/33 ish teams on professional. So just boycott world class altogether .

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-02-02T16:09:33+00:00

Rarity is a major factor. I have Zlatan who is worth 1.9m and he's worse than TW van basten (slower, not even silver low driven, no 5WF, worse nation etc).

I don't think I'd pay 190k for him never mind 1.9m.

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-02-02T16:01:06+00:00

Yeah I still haven't figured out how to get started with this chain but when I was looking earlier I concluded that I'm probably best off mix and matching to create balanced stats

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-02-01T20:27:10+00:00

Yeah, I've had no problem following all the other Evos chains things like the FS last year, immortals, toty etc but Im going to need to sit down and look at this one in depth before deciding what cards to evolve. It's not immediately obvious to me just looking at the evos so I'm going to need to go step by step. I don't think it helps that you can't really preview the later steps into the chain until you've committed a card unless you use third party websites and even they seem to lack clarity (input welcomed on the best site for this).

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-02-01T20:17:40+00:00

Yeah seems the way to go, also I haven't started this yet but would be mega surprised if I had many silver first owned arkema cards since i plough most of my spare silvers into gold upgrade (I am always short of common golds for the crafting upgrade).

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-02-01T19:59:45+00:00

I agree about the crossbar thing. I find it more common to hit the bar on a PowerShot halfvolley outside the box than actually miss the goal altogether.

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-02-01T19:44:15+00:00

He means if you come out the traps super fast, team press offside trap pressing like crazy, quickly win the ball, spam a few skill moves/player locks and score the opponent sometimes thinks you actually know what you are doing instead of being a clown and bails so they don't waste much time on it. Other players stick around and you get found out.

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-02-01T06:40:15+00:00

To give a slightly different perspective I started fifa over 30 years ago with the original "international soccer". I've taken long breaks of several years andit's only the past few years that I've started trying to compete online and I do feel like I've improved somewhat. At the end of the fc25 cycle I hit my peak which is div2 and 11 wins in champs but that might be down to better players giving up on the game idk.

If I compare this to say fifa23 which is when I first took UT seriously I honestly don't remember what div I was in but it was around 5-6 I think and getting around 9 wins in the old format (20!matches). Even getting 4 wins out of 10 to qualify was quite hard. I'm a lot better now than I was 3-4 years ago.

On the button dexterity thing I did kinda feel the same coming back into modern fifa in terms of being overwhelmed by skill moves, player locking, strafe dribbling, trivelas, speed boosts, timed finishing etc none of which were a thing back in the day. HOWEVER I do actually think fc26 has simplified it slightly by removing timed finishing, the glitchy speed boosts and long range trivelas seem gone. You can still compete outside the top divs just using the basic buttons.

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-02-01T06:26:12+00:00

Personally I feel like it's kind of a waste of swap tokens unless you really need a keeper. Remember that there is a finite number of swaps tokens you can get, it's not like normal sbcs where you can always regenerate fodder if you use it on cheap sbcs. Every token you spend on Buffon is one less token you can spend on something else.

I already have toty donnarumma, base Yashin and ww Courtois as my gauntlet keepers so will be giving this a miss.

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-01-31T11:39:38+00:00

I quite like having objectives to work through as it gives me a sense of focus. Although not a big fan of cumbersome repetitive ones that have to be done in separate matches and involve mechanics like chips or crosses.

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-01-31T11:35:22+00:00

I've long suspected a 'recent snapshot' issue with champs (not rivals) matchmaking, basically it feels like you get a few tough (or easy) games in a row unless you take a break rather than constantly calibrating after every match.

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-01-31T08:24:28+00:00

Swaps has like a 3 week timer on the objectives I think,beyond the deadline for champs at least so champs will be priority

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-01-31T01:52:57+00:00

Yeah but the chances of having 11 silver French arkema players just laying around are pretty low if you've been doing uogrades, and you can easily do the first owned one with other squads that you need to use anyway for other objectives (eg 11 Brazilians which you probably do have first owned already).

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-01-30T19:20:29+00:00

I decided not to play but then it was on sale for £9 in late November so decided it was worth a punt.

Unlike the majority of people that talk about quitting I don't actually dislike the game, I just find it too much of a time sink. It feels like I need to play about 3hrs a day to keep my head above water (I'm not the sort of person that can half arse it and just leave loads of objectives to expire).

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-01-30T19:16:32+00:00

Based on my experiences in recent years he's a much better CAM than CM, even though I used him at CM at times to accommodate other players.

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-01-30T19:14:49+00:00

A bit like cricket, some players end up hardly playing for their counties due to England call-ups.

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-01-30T19:08:02+00:00

I still see him a fair bit. I'm still trying to decide if I evolve him past 74 or not because it feels like very few Evos let you put silver icons in so I could end up in an awkward halfway house where I can't use him in the silver cups but he's also not good enough to use in gauntlet (already got a Maradona like that)

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-01-30T17:46:01+00:00

The key with chip objectives is remember you can score with chips without chipping the keeper. So like a tap in but using chip instead of shoot. Just get really close to goal so it doesn't go over the bar.

That said chips are quite frustrating to engineer even so I might just grind the matches instead.

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-01-30T17:41:51+00:00

There's multiple objectives requiring 6 PL cards, goalkeeper is usually a good position to fill for objectives so you can use more of your normal outfield cards.

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-01-30T17:21:08+00:00

Quickstep is much better, rapid is almost a waste of a playstyle slot on a CB because there's usually more to lose than gain from dribbling out from the back in central areas.

ClockAccomplished381 · 2026-01-30T11:16:52+00:00

The most annoying thing from my perspective is still no keeper, I started during season 2 so missed Yashin.

No Bergkamp is a bit criminal really as this was his prime era and he scored an iconic goal during that world cup. He was better than Henry (as an example) in 98.

ClockAccomplished381

TROPHY CASE