After examination, feeling pretty positive with the changes to crits in N4.

So, overall I was fine with crits in N3 and how they functioned. Getting your expensive Umbra get crit by some jerk with a SMG firing Shock ammo sucked, but that was more of an indictment of Shock than anything else imo. When I saw the changed in N4, I wasn't necessarily worried, but I wasn't enthusiastic either. It seems like more of a sidegrade than anything else. Crits were just different.

After playing a good amount of games, however, I think the changes to crits have done a couple of things. First, it's made armor more valuable, since even if crit you can still pass both saves and be unharmed. Second, it's made wounds less valuable, because having 2W no longer means being able to guaranteed shrug a single crit. Maybe it's an extreme example, but in one of my recent games, an infiltrating Grunt crit a Cameronian with his light shotgun, and the Cameronian failed both saves. In N3, that could never have happened in a single order.

Obviously this is all playing out in the context of it being generally understood that in N3, ARM was overcosted and wounds were overcosted. While you might have a 2W model that was appropriately costed, if you had low-armor models with multiple wounds (a lot of the Tohaa symbio-armor troopers) they tended to be more powerful than their points would suggest, and if you had high-arm models with a single wound (N3 Mormaers, yes I know they had dogged but you get the point) they tended to be less powerful than their points would suggest. So my thought would have been to adjust the points of ARM and Wounds/Structure, but this tilts it a bit in the other direction, and probably closer towards balance.