You mentioned it is a HP race. HP is very valuable in PvP and PvE. It makes sense to be the go to stat.
Two separate tangents to the Bowquest in Red p99 I find intriguing.
1. Shadow Knights and Paladins have a max Archery skill of 75. Do skills affect miss rate in PvP? If I were to wager I don't think they do.
In short in PvE only weapon skill affects chance to hit.
Weapon skill contributes to ATK so it's often conflated, but ATK is what's used vs the opponent's AC to calculate damage, not chance to hit.
Here's where everybody ends up being right: in EQ, if damage is mitigated to 0, it displays as miss. Even though you actually hit the enemy, it was just reduced to 0.
So anything that affects ATK (i.e. weapon skill, offense skill, and STR) will impact how frequently you see a miss on screen due to "false" misses from damage output vs mitigation.
But only weapon skill impacts a true miss.
2. For Red server there is an entry that eludes that AGI affect hit rating.
Here -
https://wiki.project1999.com/Statistics
On Red server Dexterity affects PVP hit rate. It does this by comparing your dexterity to your opponent's agility. There is no evidence that Dexterity affects hit rate in PVE.
How is this compared?
For Example:
Attacking player has 70 Dex they roll a random number 1-70 ; They get a 67
Defending player has 200 Agi they roll a random number 1-200 ; They get a 59
Does the attacker hit the defending player?
Is it that simple?
I don't expect p99 developers to release this information nor to reprogram the system to make it more accurate.
I just find it interesting.