As far as stamina goes, it actually takes a surprising amount of gear to get there if you're not an ogre/troll. The DE magelo Snaggles posted earlier was pretty close to the best gear you can realistically get without actual raid loot, and it was like 30 points short. And that's with 2x hammered loop for a juicy -30 AC. To actually get to 205 unbuffed stamina on a smaller race, you generally need at least full Skyshrine (Kael has better AC but hardly any stam) and all the quested stuff like BoBs, and probably a handful of actual raid boss drops as well. That's not something you just get. I wager less than 5% of P99's players ever reach that stage of gearing. This is the real reason why the beefy races are generally better. For the vast majority of players, it's easily 50ish additional stamina even with shaman buffs.
And then there's still advantages to being capped in Kael gear, and especially capping without the STA buff so that you're not reliant on that. It both frees up a buff slot on raids and makes it so you're still optimized in groups that don't happen to have a shaman. STR/DEX/AGI generally doesn't matter much for a knight, but maintaining maxed STA is a pretty significant advantage. Depending on what gear you're wearing, it can amount to as much as half the raw HP on your gear. It's very significant if you're doing tough content. Imagine what a 250 HP charm item would cost. That's often what ogres effectively get for free.
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