I wonder if having luck below a certain level (maybe 3) will have a negative affect--like will that increase the chances that bad things will happen to you (for example: weapon failures, randomly encountering a high level enemy, pianos falling on you, etc.). Or if it simply means that you don't get the benefits of luck.

I assume you are kidding, right?

Mysterious Stranger is one of the most powerful perks in the entire game, especially with max Luck. Very high chance of instant kill against any enemy regardless of distance, enemy strength/health, etc. Right, quite useless (/sarcasm).

Luck is the most powerful stat just by numbers, just as it is in TES. Role playing is a different matter, but it amuses me to no end when various people claim Luck is a "dump" stat. That tells me that such people don't know the numbers behind the game mechanics. You can role play lower luck, of course, and you can certainly play the game with lower luck, but max luck is so powerful compared to other stats that it's very difficult to pass up unless you are deliberately gimping your character.

Yeah, but is it better to be smart?

My gut is telling me that Grim Reaper's Sprint has been changed so that, instead of refilling your AP after a kill in VATS, it refills your crit bar after killing something with a critical hit. Which means you could potentially chain crit kills if you shoot straight. And that's still less broken than Grim Reaper's Sprint in Fallout 3.

yeah atm we don't know if random crits happen anymore in video footage it seems you fill meter and when in vats you can chose to fire a crit shot/strike as long as meter is full. so this point until we get play the game random crits might be dead.......

and luck determines how fast this new crit bar fills up so yeah theres that as well.

Looks like luck might have been nerfed not to affect loot drops anymore. That was the primary reason I was going to push luck really high, too.

They definitely changed the description so that it doesn't mention loot any more, but I don't know. Maybe it's all locked behind ranks of Scrounger and Fortune Finder? And then there's whatever L5 does...

Yep. That's what I intend to do. I'm going to make two characters. Mr. SS is going to start with 10 Luck and Mrs. SS is going to start with 10 Charisma.

No, I kid ye not.

The Mysterious Stranger would always appear at the end of a VATS sequence, which I'd say by that time (most of the time anyway) the enemy you're shooting at is either dead from VATS or near dead from VATS, even more so if you have high Luck in the first place considering the critical hit chance you have anyway. At most, the only thing the Mysterious Stranger is doing at that point is just finishing off something you could have already done yourself outside of VATS. The only exception I see for this is for one of Broken Steel or Mothership Zeta's absurd bullet sponge enemies, when a single VATS isn't going to cut it for them and the Mysterious Stranger's damage could be helpful (but then it's just a perk that is only good to deal with bad game design ). But of course, that's not taking into consideration IF he shows up. I remember playing a high Luck playthrough when taking the Mysterious Stranger perk and out of 200 hours, he had only appeared 32 times in VATS. No doubt a lot of those times were most certainly ones I didn't need him to finish off that measly raider that was one shot away from death, or whatever other time he would bug the hell out of VATS and leave my character standing there getting shot at because I'm stuck in the VATS sequence. So yeah, quite useless, and not one worth getting in my opinion.

Now, you're right about one thing. Luck can be a powerful stat. But like I said, if you have any interest in dealing critical damage that is. Very powerful in that regard. But in its other areas regarding looting, like if someone was going to invest in Luck in Fallout 4 for looting, I'd say not very essential based on experience with previous games. But you're right about me not knowing the specifics behind the numbers for the stat. All I know is from my experience I felt no difference in the loot I was getting with high luck compared to low luck from my many playthroughs in the Fallout games (the only exception being the random encounters which I noticed appeared far more often with higher luck, and some of those encounters have some loot behind them). By the end of it you're going to be inevitably well-equipped regardless. But if you know the numbers, by all means, do educate me on it and I may just have a change of thought.

What if the Mysterious Stranger can appear outside of VATS, now? Like, we're just fighting real-time and a kill-cam suddenly happens where the Mysterious Stranger knocks them dead - I'd be down for that.

If you can Crit outside of Vats I am going to get 10/10 in LUCK for my Unarmed build.

If not, I won't put more than 4 or 5 points.

It just WORKS

*Todd thumbs up*