What is spell "exhaustion"?

and what does it mean?

I've run searches a ton of times and I still can't find any solid info on this effect used in the spell descriptions...

Any help or good links would be appreciated...

It lowers the maximum amount of energy you have for a short time. For example, say you start out with 40/40 energy. You cast a spell (cost = 10) that causes exhaustion, and it brings you to 30/35 energy. As your energy starts rebuilding, so does your maximum. So it goes something like this:

31/35
32/36
33/36
34/37
35/37
36/38
etc

So if you cast a few spells that cause exhaustion, pretty soon you're at a real low max energy, and it takes a little while longer for it to return than if you just cast regular spells with no exhaustion.

awesome...thank you soo much for the info..

that answer was right on the mark.

does anyone know how long it takes for your to completely return to normal after casting one spell with exhaustion? I also noticed that it removes a regen arrow in addition to reducing your max energy.

Never noticed the regen reduction. Not sure exactly how long it takes for exhaustion to wear off, but it seems like a matter of a few seconds. Unless you are stacking exhaustions (spamming obsidian flame for example).

It does not reduce regen. Also, it takes away the full cost of the spell. In the example above, if you had 40/40 energy and cast a 10 energy exhaustion spell, you would end with 30/30 energy, not 30/35. Exhaustion is only seen in Elementalist spells (most high end fire nuke spells, armor ignoring earth spells, and a lot of high end air spells).

Exhaustion has only cost me 5 energy...ever.
I may be wrong, but I'm not.

Or am I?

im pretty sure each exhaustion is 10 exhausted energy

Exhaustion is 10 energy for my character, even with cost of 5 energy skill.

Exhaustion is 10 energy each time, regardless of the spell causing it.

It goes away at a rate of 1 point every 3 seconds, so it takes 30 seconds to fully recover from one hit of exhaustion. Note that this is the same rate as 1 arrow of energy regen - so if you exhaust yourself completely, it's like having only one arrow. Not fun.

Exhaustion does not reduce energy regen at all, unless you have enough of it that your current energy is bumping up against the grey part.