I am deciding to play my assassin character on hardcoe. Why, I don't know. But I am wondering if there is anything I should know about HC. if there are any skills//traits//perks I should grab that normally I would overlook. Right now I am planning on going Guns, Repair, Sneak, and putting points into Guns, repair, sneak, lockpick and speech.

my special is 6/6/4/4/6/8/6

I just don't want to go into HC and die because it's monumentally different.

Despite how others complain about it, I think that the Survival skill is very useful in hardcoe... if only because you'll need it to cook up all the steaks that you can.

If you don't want to waste points there, there are mods that will allow you to cook all the steaks right from the beginning, although even then your survival skill will affect the quality of your steaks.

My first playthrough was with with hardcoe and I didn't notice much difference in difficulty. I already didn't use much healing in the middle of combat so if you're someone who really relied on stimpacks during combat that will have quite an impact but otherwise it just requires a bit more planning to make sure you don't get overly dehydrated or that you only carry the ammo you need.

I'll echo Mister Nutsy's suggestion, Survival will make it easier to handle some things introduced by the hardcoe - particularly if you don't just fast travel around when you need something and actually try and rough it.

There are some perks that have more weight in hardcoe, like Cannibal (extra food sourec) and Adamantium Skeleton (need fewer doctor's bags) as well as some builds (heavy weapons require more care when ammo has weight, unarmed and melee don't require ammo) but none of these are deal-breakers.

Pack Rat is brilliant in HC mode and well worth the investment in barter, you should have skill points to spare anyway with 8 INT. It's worth getting survival to 50-odd for the healing options too, you'll be stacking food and drink on top of stimpaks when things get dangerous.

I think 55 is really max you will need but you will be fine with a survival of 30. you can buy most of your food and drinking water from any source will take care of your hydration.

The second big advantage to Survival in hardcoe mode is that it increases the amount food and drink heals you by. Since you don't have the magic healing of stimpacks (they become heal over time), you have to plan ahead and stack healing buffs before going into big fights instead of reacting when you get hurt. Higher survival means better healing.