Reclaim Energy in P99
 

I may be new to Project 1999, but I have many years of experience in regular EQ. I am trying to figure out how Reclaim Energy works, as it doesn't seem to work like it did pre-Luclin.

In the original EQ, reclaim energy would yield 1 mana per 10 current hit points left of the pet summoned. A fresh fire pet at level 12 would yield approximately 15-20 mana, even though it cost 120 mana to summon in the first place (much suckage - Reclaim went to the back of the book for me). A fresh earth pet at 49 would reclaim more mana than it cost to summon, because of its large hit point pool.

Post-Luclin, changes were made to the spell such that pet hit points were no longer relevant to reclaim. If you did not have the Improved Reclaim AA, then you would reclaim back 75% of the mana cost to summon the pet, regardless of its current hit points (this can be useful for reclaim chaining pets). If you had Improved reclaim trained, then that percentage would rise to 90%. This change nerfed "pet canni" (summoning a fresh 49 earth pet, then reclaiming him for 100 to 200 extra mana each time, making for some killer mana regen, at the expense of malachite, unless you had the AA that prevented a pet summon from consuming it).

Now onto Project 1999. Just to experiment a little, I summoned a level 12 fire pet, and immediately reclaimed him, just to see if I could summon a higher level pet. Each resummon/reclaim cycle consumed less than 20 mana on balance, allowing me to pick and choose a good pet to work with, at a cost of malachite, of course. This means that Reclaim Energy is giving me back a lot more than 1 mana per 10 hit points of the pet.

Here is my question: How does Reclaim Energy work on the Project 1999 servers? Is it based on current hit points, mana spent to cast, or is it something totally different, like percentage of pet hit points relative to full? One thing I can tell you for certain, is that Reclaim is not working the way it did/does on the EQ live servers, then or now. I'm not complaining, but I am immensely curious to figure this one out.

I believe the way it works is it returns the amount of mana that it took to summon the pet, times the current % of the pet's health. So if the summon spell costs 200 mana to cast and the pet is at 50% health, reclaim should return 100 mana.

Somebody correct me if there is another variable in the computation I missed, but that is how I believe it is working.

I think Tuurin is correct, that's why the spell is especially great for classes with huge spell costs. On a tangent: That's why every shaman should have a reclaim energy item (mage focus item works from inventory), hugely usefull. Pet becomes mana battery.

I think the calculation is almost correct, the formula removes 1 from the total gain. In the exemple given, it would return 99 mana. The reason for this is if you summon a pet when full mana and immediately reclaim it, you will go back at 99% (precisely 1 mana short from full mana).