So an alien blaster with long barrel, sharpshooter's grip and highest rank of gunslinger does only 120 damage. A mighty overcharged improved sniper barrelled laser pistol does 179. Jezas louieseas! How many more things can go wrong?

The blaster was so powerful on previous games because it always (almost always?) guaranteed a critical hit, multiplying its already high damage to absurd levels.
In Fallout 4, you have the critical meter that tells you exactly when crits are possible and you decide when to execute them. This system doesn't allow for weapons to have a higher or lower critical chance.

And because critical hits arent random anymore it has another negative to it. Though on the wiki it states that it works like a silenced gun works. The weak damage of that gun has me thinking DLC perhaps?!?! ninja'd me bro!

Ugh they ruined the crit system, they didn't improve it. I hope there's a option patched in where you can choose to have it an rng proc and the FONV non VATS kill cam activates.

You'd think it'd be the best weapon in game as its more advanced than anything humanly created so far. So far strongest wep in my book is the Gauss Rifle at 282 damage and its chargeable

Man, you supposed to find this weapon early in the game, and I think that's the problem. It does a good amount of damage in the early-game sequences.

Agreed. I don't want to see crits attached to VATS at all, I want to see crits being proper crits as we all understand them to be...random lucky bursts of greatly improved damage.

Fully agree that they ruined crits, wish it was the way it used to be.

Its pretty pathetic yeah. Im fine with how crits are now though since it means I wont randomly take a crit headshot and die as soon as a fight starts ( or crit deathclaw swipe)

And its possible they made crits need to be earned due to somewhat simple builds that allowed you to have guaranteed crits 24/7 in the past games. Besides with how high your damage can be now due to Rifleman,etc the old crit system would rip the ass off anything in this game.

Personally think the whole weapon system is gimped IMO. It seems as you level some weapons become slightly more powerful and then you mod them to make them more so. Yet a slew of weapons and their mods seem unaffected by this( I.E sub-machine gun ). So unless I'm missing something once you reach a certain level a lot of weapons, modded or otherwise, become absolutely useless.

The alien blaster is a bit under expectations, yes. Admttedly, I am fine with this as I never really liked the alien weapons much anyway. I always preferred human energy weapons. Give me an AER 9 and an AEP 7 anyday.

I have not used the new critical system enough to judge it yet, but I will say that it was almost overly powerful (almost broken) in the previous two titles with the right builds. In Fallout: New Vegas I had approximately a thirty percent critical chance with my laser rifle, and most shots were head shots. I am fairly certain those headshot criticals would be approximately 220 damage, and there are even better critical builds.

it could be one of the weaker weapons in there aresenal..or the only weapon he was able to drag out of the burning ship? I hope theres a dlc about aliens....(gets ready)

My biggest issue with the Alien Blaster is how slow the projectile flies. It's slower than plasma. If you don't use the weapon at point blank range, you can forget hitting anything with it. The enemy will have performed the entire thriller dance by the time the projectile arrives. You could fire at the enemy and then rush in and bare fist bludgeon them to death before the projectile arrives and still have time to dodge it before it hits you in the back. Also, it has bad iron sights... not that you'd need them for hip firing at point blank range. You can put a scope on it so that you can watch enemies perform the thriller dance while the firework show slowly crawls through the air towards them.

Worst gun.

Your assumption that the Alien Blaster isn't the Pipe Pistol of Alien technology is a bad one....

They finally balanced it and, that's an improvement.

Seriously, random critical hits are one of the most dumbest game mechanics to ever have... At least in games like this.

That's just a stupid bland mechanic that does nothing more but allow you to get "lucky" in combat. The new VATS way of doing it allows critical hits to be maintained and work more as they should. If you're fighting a radroach, you are just going to kick it or something. You won't waste critical power on that due to you randomly using critical power! No, you'll save your critical energy for something like a Legendary Deathclaw.

Makes much more sense and is more balanced that way.

This system is terrible. It makes VATS pretty much far superior for most weapons. Choices = good. There was no reason to take away real time crits all it did was reduce builds.

yea my goto gun when im not using the overseers rifle fully modded, is a guass Rifle i have that full modded with full rilfeman and 25% dam boost does about 486 dam

Having builds around the idea of random criticals is not a good balancing idea. Real time criticals should be based on special occasions.

You do have a choice. Don't use VATS, and run and gun. When you want to perform a crit, engage VATS, use your crit, and pop out. It's not like engaging VATS is a cumbersome mechanic.

It may not be a choice that you like, but it's a choice. I personally prefer it that way. Imo, a crit should be something to use when you want to use it.

What are criticals anyway?

So random critical hits were stupid in table top RPGs?

Critical hits are meant to simulate an occasional "lucky hit." The concept represents the effect of hitting an artery, or finding a weak point, such as a stab merely in the leg causing less damage than a stab in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achilles_tendon. Critical hits are almost always random, although character attributes or situational modifiers may come into play. For example, games in which the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_character have a "Luck" attribute will often base the likelihood of critical hits occurring on this statistic: a character with high Luck will deal a higher percentage of critical hits, while a character with low Luck may, in some games, be struck by more critical hits. In the role playing game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons, when a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_character attacks an opponent the player typically rolls a 20-sided die; a roll of 20 (a 5% chance) results in a critical hit.

Taken from wikipedia (not necessarily the most creditable source but it does a decent enough job at explaining the concept)

I personally like the idea of having two different type of criticals

The lucky shot type: IE you aimed and hit the leg but also luckly manage to do more damage due to hitting a weak point like artery. (luck has a bigger play in real time combat)

The critical power type: IE Vats magically doing more damage like purposely aiming at the artery.

Probably. Depends on the game really. There are sometimes where random critz can be justified and fine in the game. But most of the time, they are used poorly or shouldn't even be in the game at all.

There are several perks that can crank up Criticals, both in Agility and a bunch in Luck.

I use VATS almost exclusively, on Survival difficulty, and I find the new Critical system is a great tool to use tactically with high rof pistols/automatic weapons, and in conjunction with other perks like Ninja and Concentrated fire, to name a few. I have no problem at all with the fact that it's not random- if it were it would have to be a very high frequency rate like in past games which gets boring after a while.

I like having to build up and choose when to use criticals and with a stealth-type character, between managing crits, managing hp regen and managing stealth and cover I find combat super rewarding.

Crits should only proc OUTSIDE of V.A.T.S. Then they wouldn't be so OP as they were in the old games. If the luck stat is meant to randomize things, that's how it should be. RANDOM! FO4 litterally forces you to use VATS if you want to land a critical. it's Bull!