At level 12, I used Slasher, Med-X, Rushing Water, and Turbo, to lay waste to 2 Deathclaws, 2 Young DCs, and 4 Viper Gunslingers simultaneously with Chance's Knife. ED-E and Cass were taking a nap. I forgot the Buffout.

Si, but it's really overpowered, the withdrawal isn't nearly enough to balance it out, and the cost to fix withdrawal or for a Fixer is too cheap.
Stacking food on non-hardcoe is also pretty yummy, especially crafted food from Survival.

I'm using Logan's Loophole until I go to the Big MT. I just discovered all the awesome recipes too; I feel stupid for neglecting Survival for so long. As of right now, it seems superior to Medicine except for the numerous skill checks.

I dunno, Survival loses a big chunk of usefulness when switching over to hardcoe Mode, and in HCM it's only useful if you craft things with it.
That's what nice about Medicine in hardcoe Mode, it's a passive skill, no need to craft any healing powder or poultice, just buy some stimpaks and be on your merry way.
Though Survival has way cooler perks than what Medicine has.

I would actually argue Survival is superior all around, even in hardcoe mode. At least until you complete Lonesome Road.

Gathering ingredients requires effort, sure, but with stimpacks you just have normal ones and super stims to stack. Survival offers Bloatfly sliders, Gecko steak, brahmin steak, desert salad, bighorner steak (VERY easy to collect), Gecko kebab and more. If you're in an absolutely deadly situation, the result is that Survival can be stacked to offer you a good ~50 HP regenerated per second. Medicine, until you complete Lonesome road, can only offer....what, 20-30 HP per second? And Super stims are very brief, semi-rare and costly and have a serious withdraw effect.

In HCM those things are crap though.
I think Gecko Steak or Bighorner Steak gave +1 STR or something but that's about it, apart from some minor increase to some stat I find most food in HCM to be crap.
And even if some things are great it's a pain in the ass to hunt around for the ingredients needed.
Not to mention it weighs you down even more. Medicine's items, apart from Doctor Bags, weigh nothing.

How are they crap? You can stack them for better healing. Medicine doesn't even offer buffer stats; hell, it debuffs you.
The only downside is convenience, both in weight and gathering the ingredients, but if you make an effort to hunt and take the Pack Rat perk, these become minimalized.

1. What in Survival can you stack in HCM beyond Healing Powder/Poultice?
2. I don't care that much for minor bonus effects though. Only debuff I know of is withdrawal and super stimpaks.
3. I lazy tho.

I just made a list and you ignored it. xD

Brahmin steak, Gecko steak, Bighorner steak. All three are incredibly common, easy to make and heal 5 HP over 15 seconds. Stack all three and you have 15 health returned per second for 15 seconds.
Desert Salad regenerates like 15 HP alone for 20 seconds (all of this is from memory, could be slightly off). From experience, it's rare to make as it requires Pinyon nuts BUT the other ingredients are incredibly common, so the moment you have pinyon nuts, you'll know you can make a desert salad.
Bloatfly Sliders just need Bloatfly meat and one of the cactus plants. Those heal like 8 or 10 HP over 15 seconds.
Deathclaw omelette is an obvious one, though personally I never make them cause I simply can't be assed to carry their giant eggs.
Gecko kebab is an alternative to gecko steak, think it requires jalepenos, and is useful in the sense that it heals 2 HP over 40 seconds, thus giving you a way to heal minor wounds as you travel.

There's likely more, but these are the ones I bother to use due to convenience.

But they don't heal in HCM, that's what I was talking about.
Without HCM active Survival is way better than medicine.
With HCM it's healing items are a lot more limited.

(HCM = hardcoeMode)

Are you saying food doesn't heal in HCM? coz it most certainly does.

Erm...

I recently had one of my proudest accomplishments where I stormed Camp Golf's main lobby with my Legion character successfully. Killed all the rangers on my own without dying, with just a Ballistic fist. It's a pure Legion playthrough so no chems allowed, so I had to heal myself during the fight with every food item I had. Very hard hardcoe mode.

What?

Did they change it or something?
I remember clearly from day one that food's healing effects were taken off in HCM in order to make it more "hardcoe".
Maybe I'm going mentally ill.

[edit]

I am going mentally ill.

You remember wrooooooong!

That was never the case. Food has always healed over time in either mode.

In regards to some of your earlier remarks, there's a LARGE range of foods you can stack to increase benefits, and as you raise your survival skill all effects from food and alcohol are increased--e.g., you drink a beer with survival 100 you get a +3 buff to STR and CHR whereas it's a +1 buff at low levels. Many items you can craft have better healing benefits over various times than stimpaks, and a few offer some amount of AP boost or strength buff as well. That's not even taking into account that in HC you have to eat and drink anyway, and certain low weight craftable items will do both in addition to their other benefits. Let's not forget you can craft poisons and Hydra also. So even a lazy guy like you could make use of the Survival skill I mean ingredients are all over the place anyway, including large batches at the NCR sharecropper farms and in the Sink once you upgrade it. You get a few decent caches of food items stored up at your hideouts and you can potentially make thousands of caps selling off your stimpaks.

Dat I did.

I have no idea why I remember food not healing..
Maybe it's one of the mods I installed which I became so used to that I took it as a core game design by Obsidian.
So yes I stand corrected, food does heal.
...
...
IMO food should not heal in HCM. >_>

I think the idea of implementing Survival was to be of value to the hardcoe player specifically, so as not to force you to rely solely on medicine (which is supposed to be "rare" anyway according to the earliest press I remember) and also to synergize with weight restrictions--e.g., foods that replenish both the FOD and H20 meters and have low weight rather than several bulkier items that do either/or, strong poisons that can turn a humble knife or pipe into something a lot more deadly and useful against a wider range of enemies rather than some massive, devastating weapon(s). If food didn't heal it would break that and defeat the purpose entirely. Granted, food obviously doesn't heal you irl, but you also don't have magical syringes that take you from almost dead to fine just fine in a matter of seconds. They might have balanced it better but if you didn't have items that give you like 600 hp over a minute and poisons that practically make your enemies [censored] then there'd be less of a viable reason to sink points into it.