Many things in this game are very confusing, and fatigue is one of the biggies. I'll try to do this, but entire threads on the official forums are dedicated to the topic, and still folks have trouble with it.
After lvl 5, you begin to see the fatigue bar. Fatigue is not a bonus, nor does it make you level twice as fast. XP in the game is designed to include fatigue xp as a standard part of your progression. When you defeat a mob or turn in a quest, you get a certain amount of xp which is divided between "regular" xp, the purple part of the xp bar, and "fatigue" xp, the blue part. Both xp types grow as you play, but you don't get to count your fatigue xp into your progression to the next level until you rest. When you rest, the fatigue xp is converted to regular xp, and now counts towards your progression to the next level.
When you turn level 5, you are given a certain amount of "fatigue" xp you can earn (I believe it is 15,000 but I could be wrong on the number). Each day at a given time (I've seen 4AM and 7AM based on where the server is located) you get an additional amount of fatigue xp you can earn (I believe 2,000 but again could be wrong). The amount of fatigue xp you can earn builds up each day, so if you don't play for 3 days, for instance, you would have 6,000 fatigue xp "built up" when you next log back in.
Once the fatigue xp total is depleted, you no longer get that portion of xp when you kill a mob or turn in a quest until the next morning when you get your daily alotment.
What this does, then, is penalize those who earn copious amounts of xp in one day because after a certain amount of time, they are only earning approx. 1/2 of the xp they would get if they had accrued fatigue xp still. In order to progress through levels the way the game is designed, by questing, you have to have fatigue. If you burn through your fatigue, you will run out of quests of your appropriate level, and have to grind mob kills for low xp.
The consensus is that there will be some item, potion, rune, etc. available in the item shop that you can purchase that will restore a certain amount of fatigue xp, so the devs can earn a buck or two.
So far, I've played a couple hours a day, have reached lvl 11-12 on a few different toons, and have never even come close to running out of my accrued fatigue. If things stay at release the way they are now in beta, you'd have to be pretty hard core to risk running out of fatigue xp.
That's as clear as I can put my understanding of fatigue into words. Hopefully it comes across as clear as I think it does.
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Currently - Combat Arms-Xerxer
Last edited by Xerxer; 11th December 2009 at 01:33 PM.
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