They went too heavy handed on the VATS, it limits the game and forces you into undesired playstyles.

The Problem is they removed one entirely. Had they just added the new one I wouldn't be complaining, but they removed one entirely.

As I said, I use VATS almos all the time, so it works fine for me. I'm an RPG guy- can't aim for s**t, lol! I can understand that if you manually aim it might not work for you, though. Maybe looking in the Luck skill trees might let you tweak it so it works better- I haven't taken too close a look myself.

Ummm, I am pretty sure random crits are still in the game. It is just that you can also save up and execute crits intentionally too. It didn't remove all other crits. Just go in with a laser or plasma rifle with increased crit chance and notice how many more ashes and puddles there are, that is because of crits.

On the note of criticals outside of V.A.T.S. The chem overdrive states a "+25% Critical Chance". What are everyone's thoughts?

I haven't done extensive testing but from what I have seen I do think that there are critical hits outside of vats. Many of the mods of weapons increase critical change and damage. And when you put them all on a laser weapon or plasma weapon you get a lot more of those ash piles and stuff which, in other fallout games at least, signified critical hits.

If you made it into a Rifle, you need Rifleman and not Gunslinger.
Also, you can still get Ninja perk to increase Sneak attacks to x3.5. That's pretty damn powerful, if you ask me. But I agree that the weapon is underwhelming, when considering the ammo and whatnot.

Finally, I think people here are wrong about critical hits. Because I've seen several examples of unusually massive damage being done with weapons, when already in combat and not sneak attacking. Critical hits seems to still exist in the game, it's just that you now also have a crit meter (and possibly a much lower critical chance, to make up for the new feature).

For how OP it was in previous fallouts it really seems lackluster thats for sure

I feel sorry for the poor little bastard aliens that land on FO4 earth expecting a walkover.

I can hear Stong saying: "Tastes like chicken."

Lets face it, youre only saying that because you lack the skill or effort required to either;

A - run a stealth build, since stealth gets a damage multiplier seperate from crits which is pretty big anyway

B - run a critical build, since the damage and charge rate from upgraded criticals means you can pretty much use them on a constant basis, not just once every 10 minutes

Im running a max luck build now, havent invested in stealth nor any gun damage boosting perk.
I constantly get criticals that negate the lower base damage with weapons so that doesnt really matter.. And to boot; im finding fusion cores in bins.

The systems work as intended and to be honest - i like them - criticals arent just random chance and you cant setup some stupidly OP character with a 75% crit shot chance with any gun imaginable.

I mean, the VATS cam for crits is amazing, the amount of times my camera has went to the side, slowed down time and let you slowly watch as the bullet pierces their head, with their eyeballs, jaw, ect visually dislocating..

I don't like vats and I already beat MGSV the Phantom Pain with almost all S ranks. So I'm all stealthed out for now. Vats is a bad crutch for un-optimized shooting mechanics. Compare FPS combat to Destiny, and compare Third person combat to the Last of Us of MGSV. this game falls short to all three of those in terms of combat.