what the [censored] is that?

youre complaining about how the crits work i take it, if so, i agree totally, i much prefer it being mostly random with a few ways to manipulate the rate of it but no way to directly activate or use it

Essentially it gives you the ability to perform a 'charged' attack whenever the bar is full. It should be called 'limit breaker' or something like that.

Personally I like the idea of saving up the critical for when you are in a pinch and really need the extra damage. Rule of cool is much easier to pull off with this system so that's great too.

My take it is done as a means to balance critical chance and critical damage. Those 2 elements are easy to get to point where it is way too OP.

Will see how it performs when the game is released.

I hope random crits still exist for the lucky bastards. My luck was gonna be like 8, darn it.

If the activate Criticals were some how special, like turning your enemies into ash or say adding ricochets, then I would love them. But as it is, it sounds more like normal criticals will now need to be activated and that's pretty dumb. It's why I never use high end potions in Skyrim, why CD Projekt RED simplified potions, which I still wish I had more control over but at least I actually use them now.

Beth wanted to make it something special and I do not think they succeeded.

This better not completely replace regular critical hits. It completely goes against the core concept of crits. Out of all the changes they've made, I actually think this is the one that bothers me the most. If you want to orient your character towards maximizing crits, that should be your choice. Bethesda should have just stuck with what worked. No improvement here.

Why are people assuming crits will be a vats only mechanic? Because they highlighted that vat's will be less of a fire and forget mechanic?

It comes from what we saw about SPECIAL. The Luck stat says it affects the recharge rate of critical hits, instead of the critical hit rate. It's the same reason the Intelligence stat is taken as evidence that skill points were removed, since it says Intelligence affects XP gained instead of the number of skill points.

Not really.

Borderlands did a fine job with its crit system, where it gave basically every enemy a specific logical weak zone that you had to hit to get crits.

Crits dont have to be random to be crits.

If it is acting the way some people think it is, it solves the shotgun problem.

It also says perception effects accuracy in vats, which is something I would have figured people would have the bigger issue with if it really only effects vats. I bet you can still score sneak crits and headshots.

Wondering if you can activate this outside of VATS for sniping? VATS could never reach the distance you can with normal aiming. I would like to be able to crit-snipe people without using VATS.

From what I've seen and gathered, there's a crit bar that fills over time that you can activate when full for a critical hit and the rate at which it fills is determined by your luck stat. Assuming I'm correct, I really do not like this system but I'm sure it's too late to change it now. I wish they'd kept the old system of the character having a base crit chance and each attack rolling a die to see if it crits or not and letting pure luck (determined by the luck stat) handle it like it used to in the originals. Crit chance is 1%*Luck. So if at 1 Luck, you have 1% chance to score a critical hit. At 10 Luck, you have a 10% chance. As a visual representation of how it works, imagine a 100 sided die. On the die are red numbers and green numbers. When the die is cast, if it lands red number up, no crit is scored but if it lands green number up, a crit is scored. Your Luck stat determines how many green numbers there are so with 1 Luck, only 1 number is green, with 10 Luck, 10 numbers are green.

As in Fallout 3 crit attack with shotgun applied the crit damage on all the pellets making shotgun sneak attacks with some unique guns do more damage than an mini nuke.

I wonder how it works outside of VAT, it could just be an message and you activated it on next shot, or wait to an later attack.

On the other hand nothing showed up during the minigun shootout, neither then he used vat at the end.

Either crit is not generated out of vat, it generates slowly or work on an chance basis, might also be that some weapons like miniguns does not generate crit or do it slower.

Maybe your Crit meter refills based on the successful number of regular attacks. Think of it as a combo. One hit, +1 Crit bar. 2 hits +4 Crit bar. 3 hits +9 Crit bar. Maybe faster weapons raise Crit more slowly to even out, too. Just a thought, as opposed to simply taking cover until you can Crit and then shotgun V.A.T.S.'ing someone in the face.
EDIT: Please don't hate me for my terrible math skills.

I feel like it removes another role-playing element from the game.

High luck, High crits glass cannons always have been my favorite genre of char. Now, it seems like pretty boring, I will just be hitting that crit button often enough to be bored with it.