I've been tinkering around with the characters, spawning in centurions and shit, taking on the guards...etc. What I've found out is that buffing base stamina effectively cancels out the increased drain and makes the combat less agonizingly slow, but that creates balance problems due to the way resists work. The intended purpose of raising the costs was...reduce dependency on flat regeneration from stews? That's already "solved" by enabling the normal regeneration during stamina draining activities, but this solution just creates a different problem because it goes much further than what the stews originally did, creating an overabundance of stamina. The stew would only really cancel out your drain from running. You still wouldn't regenerate any. Stamina lost from weapon swings or dodges would persist until you found time to pace or sit still for a couple of seconds, creating that extend/withdraw gameplay loop which matches NPC behavior. This new system skews combat too far in favor of withdraw. I have to stop fighting for like a minute and a half just to get enough stamina back to initiate another assault, or only swing like once every 30 seconds. I would really like it if the stamina costs of actions were reset to vanilla, and stamina were static while running. Just do away with stamina stews and tonics entirely. Having to keep them up is tedious anyways. It feels completely arbitrary and gets in the way of RP. Like my guy has to keep going to shops to get his fix of monster ultra stamina tonic like a fucking boomer, or every single one of my characters coincidentally REALLY likes apple cabbage stew.

tl;dr my feedback:

Stamina costs should remain unchanged.

Stamina should be static while running. No regen, no drain.

Eliminate stews and tonic entirely.

Change the runspeed behavior back to vanilla. Its way too harsh. Stamina is already finite. There's no use in adding another soft limit.