Stretched Particles Only Last For 2 Seconds

I’m using a Ellipsoid Particle Emitter with stretched particles to make an explosion. However, all of the particles only last for 2 seconds. No matter what the min Energy or Max Energy is set to. They all just vanish after 2 seconds. Autodestruct is unchecked. What could be causing this?

I noticed that raising the dampening in the particle renderer settings to 1 makes the problem go away. However I need a low dampening value so I can make a explosion that explodes quick at first, and then quickly slows down.