And its the same for all other healing items?

I really love how they changed this so it does not instantly heal you. It just feels cheap when you can pause the game in the middle of a fight to instantly go to full health. This way is much better, also love the fact that you see an animation first making you unable to shoot while you juice up on the stimpack. Really hope this system will carry over to the next Elder Scrolls game also.

I don't like how food is almost identical to stimpacks though. You could as well just eat to get your health up. I would rather see that food and water be used to get a 10% better health regeneration for like 5 hours or so (preferable so water and food give separate buffs so you have to have both) (And a negative buff if not eating or drinking for to long). That way it would both be beneficial to keep your character full, and on top of it have a real reason to eat for immersion benefits. I would really like a mod that changed it to this instead.

I really like how steampacks heal you over time. Ever since i played new vegas on hardcoe i couldn't go back to the fallout 3 stimpack spam.

There are two types of gamers here with different viewpoints. Those of you who have fast reflexes and lots of experience want a "challenge" and stuff like hardcoe mode in New Vegas or slow healing etc. seem good to you. That's fine but there are also gamers like me who don't have fast reflexes and will occasionally get into chokepoints in the game that are hard to get through. For instance I had to set the difficulty low to get through that Deathclaw in Concord.

Perhaps the solution is to allow you to set stimpack heal speed in the settings. Those of you who want to be healed over weeks (realism mode) can do that and those who want instant healing (especially for some particular encounter) can set that too.

You need settings like this because not everyone has the same gaming skills but we want everyone to have fun right? And there is no MMOG aspect here so fairness is not at issue.

I have great reflexes and amazing skills, still think that stimpacks being no different then food is bad design. Hoping for modders to fix this siliness.

All healing items (that I've found so far, at least) heal over time. Nothing seems to be instant anymore. This time is lengthened on Survivor.

Its practically instantanious isn't it? Except on Survivor mode.

Guys if you think you need more healing and faster healing there is a perk for it!!! Take it, problem solved!

there's a significant difference between food and stimpacks though, aside from the fact they weigh nothing at all and can heal crippled limbs, stimpacks heal based on a percent of your maximum HP, whereas food mostly heals at a flat rate. Let me elaborate on how this works, lets say at level 1 you get 100 health, in the early game most food is more effective than stimpacks because a stimpack would only heal 30% of that 100 hp...which is 30, but a regular squirrel on a stick heals 45 hp which is 45% of your health....buuut lets look at that again when you get really high level with 1000hp that squirrel on a stick still only heals 45hp which is only 4.5% of your hp whereas a stimpack still heals 30% which would be 300hp. So yeah the stimpack might seems a waste at early level, but it still infinitely scales with your max health and thus remains relevant for the entire game.

Because it was impossible to die the old way. Reduce difficulty if you fail at it. Not like anybody will judge you for it.

I invested in medic, and that helps also there's food as an alternative.