Game Mechanics: Endurance

[Danth]

Endurance suffers some glaring problems.

First, and most importantly--endurance doesn't regenerate anywhere near as fast as it should. The yellow bar shouldn't take very long at all to fill up from zero, a mere handful of ticks.

I did a little test shortly before writing this post. I ran myself out of mana, then ran myself out of endurance. I'm a 22 Paladin.

From zero of both, it took me 4 minutes to regenerate my mana to full. (15:47:07 to 15:51:11). It took me 5--FIVE--minutes to regen my endurance to full (15:47:07 to 15:52:12). Yes, you're reading this correctly, a 22 Paladin's mana actually meditates back up about 25% more quickly than his yellow bar!

Second--and probably related to the above-noted complete lack of regen--weapons which should not cause stamina loss, do. A fine Steel 2H sword never in the history of any of my EQ Paladins caused net loss of stamina. On P1999, however, it does. Likewise, ~7 weight 1H weapons do the same, and shouldn't. I believe this may be due to the lack of endurance regen--if endurance regenerated anything like its classic level, such weapons would probably cause no net stamina loss.

Third--there's a strange attack rate penalty for running below 50% endurance. This should not happen. Nothing more to add here, it's just wrong. Penalties for running low on stamina should not occur until you're virtually out (say 10% or less).

Fourth--during testing, I noticed a harmless, yet amusing quirk. Swinging on an INVULNERABLE target (in this case, a willowisp with a non-magic weapon) caused no endurance loss no matter how many times I attacked.

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For an idea of where "it should be", I never knew a sub-10 weight weapon to make the stamina bar move. This is on characters with as little as 70 stamina. The only weapons which caused net loss were a handful of extremely heavy, relatively fast (for their weight) weapons such as the Deep Six Cutlass, Wurmslayer (particularly when dual-wielded or hasted), Axe of the Iron Back, and such items--all of which have weight well in excess of 10.

In classic, the yellow bar was a total non-factor the vast majority of the time. Spells such as invigor were often regarded as near-worthless. The endurance system as it presently exists on P1999 in no way reflects the reality of classic-era Everquest.

Danth