This post assumes hardcoe mode is on.

Here's the thing: Health restoration. Using Medicine skill, you have stimpacks. Which are relatively uncommon, and quite valuable. Using Survival skill, you have food and water. Which is *everywhere*. Steaks are easy and efficient sources of healing, as are the extremely powerful healing foods like desert salad. Medicine skill has decent "burst healing" via stimpacks, but nothing that is good for ongoing, cheap, minor restoration.

My thinking here is that Medicine skill needs such a mechanic. For example: "First aid". Using common and cheap things like bandages, disinfectant, sutures, restores hitpoints at a slow rate over time. Or even make First Aid require NO materials, but you can only perform it once per game hour to prevent instant full healing.

As it is, Survival is (at least in my opinion?) hands down more useful because it lets you make, with little effort, many of the things that Medicine can only do with expensive and uncommon drugs. The only source of stimpacks that's even remotely "cheap" is to make them yourself...which requires *science* skill, not Medicine. And still requires relatively uncommon syringes.

Discuss.

Whats to discuss? you're right, medicine svcks and survivalism smokes it. one extra benefit I've noticed is that because I dont rely on stimpaks, I have a ton of them for when I do need burst healing.

Survival is much better especially with Honest Hearts, my goodness it's much better. Where's my Gecko Leather Armor.

Food items and nearly all tribal medicines (that use the medicine skill) do have weight. Also, with the Dead Money DLC installed stimpaks pop up at a max rate of 44 every three game days.

This makes me reminisce about the time where ancient cowboy repeaters were more powerful than supposedly cutting-edge-before-the-war plasma rifles... Looks like high tech got nerfed compared to low-tech here too.

Medicine gives you a lot of skill/speech checks, whereas survival gives you none. Medicine also unlocks some good perks. I like survival personally but medicine has its advantages.

You can get .44 SWCs without Hand Loader if you pass a Survival dialog check, Badger. There's also a check for survival in the Boomers history quest. Those are the two that come most readily to mind.

There really isn't a reason you can't have both. Medicine effects rad-x, radaway. But I don't think it effects doctors bags. that would be a big improvement.

A few things though, stimpacks are better then you make them out to be I've never had a problem finding them in sufficent quanties and that was before dead money made them a vending machine item.

At 100 Medicine and Survival a gecko steak heals HP +6(15s) while a stimpack heals +15hp(6s). In the end its equal but the stimpack is better, the healing is faster which is more important in a standup fight. A super stimpack will heal +60(3s). Stimpacks are also weightless which is a plus on hardcoe.

Well the base plasma rifle isn't that great, but the Q-35 is pretty powerful-as is the multi-plasrifle, when the Q-35 does a critical hit, the critical damage (which is added to base) does as much damage as a plasma caster, plus it only uses one cell instead of 2.

Plasma-Casters didn't work in third person before the patch, and now they do and they ain't buggy no more. It kills a deathclaw real fast.

The plasma pistol has a high critical mulitplier while the plasma defender has a very low AP cost.

Medicine is easily better than Survival. Stimpaks really aren't that rare, even if you hardly trade for them you'll still accumulate them at a faster rate than you can use them and eventually wind up with hundreds of the things, and unlike food they're weightless (massive advantage in my book). Add the many, many more quest applications Medicine has and I really can't see why anyone would choose Survival instead other than for RP reasons.

(Above is based on an unpatched game and may be wildly inaccurate if Medicine/stimpaks have undergone significant changes with later patches.)

edit: and I forgot the improved rad-x/rad-away, too. Medicine wins it no contest.

Why use stimpacks when you can have a nice ice cold nuka cola and Nuka Victory with Cook-Cook's Fiend Stew?

Because there's no 'Fat-fat-fatty' challenge for pigging out, but there is...STIMPADDICT!

I think that Survival is a good skill to have, but Medicine is more crucial to have. With Medicine, I can do those pesky doctor quests, pass a few good speech checks (curing Caesar FTW), and get the Living Anatomy perk, one of my favorites. I have both Medicine and Survival at 90, and I never regretted it.


Then again, I only play without hardcoe. Tough question.

I agree with the OP really, I find myself using a lot more food than stims in HC. Then again I hoard hoard Stims anyways. (5k+ and counting :whistling: )

Yes, thanks for corecting me. There are some checks associated with survival that will be important to certain builds.

Stimpacks are not uncommon. Far from it.

While stimpacks don't provide as much healing as food items from an RP standpoint it doesn't make sense in an emergency situation. I'm shot, I'm in pain, and I'm losing blood fast. Am I more likely to pull out my steak dinner or would I pull out a syringe and pump myself full of painkillers?