Damage Cap

[Gamesense0]

It's so weird how the damage cap is both annoying yet necessary (especially in mid-to-late act 2). My Maelle could just obliterate everything in 1-3 turns in a sub-optimal build as I test how she would perform if I had installed a mod that disables the cap.

[Kashra Fall]

Welcome to end game JRPG's (This one tries to imitate it.). Remember cloud against the emerald weapons with 99 dex? Goes well with a MC hammer song "Can't touch this."EX33 at least allows you to change that power if you so want to.

[Baron01]

I understand the damage cap and its necessity, however, the damage value was either set too low or some other adjustment was needed to keep the balance in check. The damage cap before completing the main story is way too low and forces you to look for multi-hit skills as those are clear winners in this situation where damage is capped at 9999. I do not need a skill dealing extreme damage but only dealing 1 hit when I can use medium damage skill where I still can hit the cap but land 5 hits.
My issue is that the cap basically makes you play two fundamentally different games, one is before you acquire "Painted Power" pictos and the other is after. I believe this situation should have been handled with a bit more subtlety than it currently is handled by the damage cap.

[MrLuckless]

I didn't really touch the end game or much of the side content, but the moment I unlocked painted powers I knew things were going to get ridiculous. When a friend said one of the side bosses would heal 1 MILLION health if you don't parry her attacks means whatever amount of damage the unlocked version can do must be pretty damn high.

[Zyrconia]

Yah, maybe if you engage with the skill system.

I'm probably not the only one who unlocked Sciel, saw the tutorial with applying stacks of whatever made up word starting with F, sun charges, mood charges, twilight and went "get the ♥♥♥♥ out of here with the geek ♥♥♥♥". Haven't used her once since.

Going through that skill tree with very similar skills and choosing the best build is such a chore to me. Turn based combat sucks, period.

The upside is that all my characters are very underpowered. Except Lune, who can do 55K damage every 2 turns :).

Verso is my second strongest character and then Maelle with 9999 on a single enemy, again every 2 turns.

But I think act 3 you loose the limit and will hit for millions.

[detective hoffman]

Originally posted by Zyrconia:

Yah, maybe if you engage with the skill system.

I'm probably not the only one who unlocked Sciel, saw the tutorial with applying stacks of whatever made up word starting with F, sun charges, mood charges, twilight and went "get the ♥♥♥♥ out of here with the geek ♥♥♥♥". Haven't used her once since.

Going through that skill tree with very similar skills and choosing the best build is such a chore to me. Turn based combat sucks, period.

The upside is that all my characters are very underpowered. Except Lune, who can do 55K damage every 2 turns :).

Verso is my second strongest character and then Maelle with 9999 on a single enemy, again every 2 turns.

But I think act 3 you loose the limit and will hit for millions.

skill issue

[Zyrconia]

Yeah, keeping the damage cap so long is silly. As in game design.

I'm starting to ignore strong moves, damage luminas, build synergies and actually playing the game with some tactics since most bits are starting to do damage cap.

Weak-ish multihit moves are the king when you reach that point.

[Zyrconia]

Oh wow, after two grueling fight with this impossible to master parry timing and one-shots, I unlocked the damage cap picto.

Went from doing a counter with 9999 damage to 350000. Since I've seen counter damage of one million. Normal attacks aren't that high, but they are 5-6 digits.

In act 3 you accumulate a lot of optional power very quickly...

[Yog-Sothoth]

I'm in act 2 and I've tried playing without the mod and with the mod and its obvious they used the 9999 cap as a band-aid for their horrible balance. Damage can get absurd with the mod removing the cap early. I'm talking hitting for over 500,000 damage in one shot before you're even out of act 2. With the cap you can have challenging main story boss fights. Without you're two tapping the main story bosses no problem.

[Ratsplat]

I am almost starting to feel that the cap was balanced til the point we no longer have it. Its just that so many people built damage over everything else. It wasn't that bosses didn't die fast enough, our party just died too fast.

[Zyrconia]

Originally posted by Ratsplat:

I am almost starting to feel that the cap was balanced til the point we no longer have it. Its just that so many people built damage over everything else. It wasn't that bosses didn't die fast enough, our party just died too fast.

That might be it. Before the damage cap, I had 40 hours of non stop one shots, each missed parry a one-shot, and now I hate this combat system.

At at the same time, many build options, combos and synergies went out the window because they would push your damage over the cap. So instead of playing the game optimally, comboing and getting synergies, you would use exclusively basic moves with many hits to bypass the limit... and get one shot...

[Ratsplat]

Originally posted by Zyrconia:

Originally posted by Ratsplat:

I am almost starting to feel that the cap was balanced til the point we no longer have it. Its just that so many people built damage over everything else. It wasn't that bosses didn't die fast enough, our party just died too fast.

That might be it. Before the damage cap, I had 40 hours of non stop one shots, each missed parry a one-shot, and now I hate this combat system.

At at the same time, many build options, combos and synergies went out the window because they would push your damage over the cap. So instead of playing the game optimally, comboing and getting synergies, you would use exclusively basic moves with many hits to bypass the limit... and get one shot...

I think well before the damage cap boss unlock fight, there's tons of ways to get damage reduction, and I think even a couple armor pictos. Shell on whole party, 30% less damage from marked targets? But we all focused damage.

[Zyrconia]

Hindsight 20/20.

Plus the influencers all showing glass canon builds didn't help...

[Ratsplat]

Originally posted by Zyrconia:

Hindsight 20/20.

Plus the influencers all showing glass canon builds didn't help...

Yep. I saw one get 9999s pretty much right after the arena. Probably a good thing the damage cap exists until a certain point.