Acutally, the tribute system works a little differently -
Say you have 1,000 points
You choose 50 points of buffs (FT 2, Regen 2, and maybe a few extra hit points).
For 50 pts you get those buffs for 10 minutes. But at the end of the 10 minutes you don't need to go back, if you still have points left, it subtracts that from your total again and the buffs are refreshed.
So in this example, your 1,000/50 = 20 refreshes of buffs
20 x 10 minutes = 200 minutes or about 3 hours. Though now with the nerf you won't get as many points for as you did.
These abilities also stack with buffs and gear (though I think you still will have your cut off of FT 15).
So its not THAT bad.
Edited, Fri Feb 13 21:57:30 2004 by Devilwind