Posted 14 March 2013 - 12:37 PM
Each hour, you regenerate 4,000 points of energy, whether you are online or not. (A full energy bar is 2 in a half hours, if completely depleted)
If you entered Cave of Ulverick (200-230), the cost to enter is 7,000 Energy. (10,000 - 7,000 = 3,000)
While you are playing, depending on how long you take, you begin regenerating energy.
If you take 30 minutes to complete the dungeon, you will have regenerated 2,000 energy. (3,000 + 2,000 = 5,000)
Now you need 30 more minutes of regeneration to gain another 2,000 points of energy, before you can enter that same dungeon. (5,000 + 2,000 = 7,000)
The overall design of this Energy bar system is to allow for more flexibility in game play. The longer you might end up waiting for a match or dungeon the more you end up regenerating which could lead you in to your next match or dungeon after. So if you're highly active and exhaust your energy quickly, you will need to wait for it to regenerate to a point you can enter another queue for a match or dungeon. You will not be able to queue if you do not meet the needs of the Game Arena mode, but it will not deduct the energy until you actually enter the Game Arena mode itself.
It is a correct observation that the overall "once per hour" dungeon run is not possible based on the values of energy cost that have been set, if you were to purely wait and if you enter dungeons immediately back to back without any wait time at all.
However, we have the future intent to include quests that will give Energy rewards, to help encourage normal game play, rather than the idea of just sitting around to wait for the bar to fill. One of the long term goals we have is to have something available to do between matches or dungeons, while you wait for the queue to accumulate a large enough group to initiate a Game Arena mode. Quests with Energy rewards are being worked towards, as well as other considerations such as Honor / Valor point exchange for energy or even the consideration to the use of zulie in exchange for incremental energy restoration.