Damage Cap is a serious problem

[Holden]

To be more specific: it's implementation on a move by move basis is a serious problem. The problem is more or less egregious depending on the character. This is a very difficult thing to explain because it's so bizarrely implemented and so counter-intuitive that people might not be able to understand what I'm saying. I'll try my best to explain what and how it's a problem.

Any attack that you perform has a corresponding multiplier. Stronger attacks have larger multipliers, naturally. The final charge attack on Vaseraga's longest combo has a whopping 4285% multiplier. This multiplier is larger than any of the other charge attack multipliers in his arsenal. This makes sense, because it takes more time and commitment to get to. If you play Vaseraga when you don't have enough gear to reach damage cap, this is the combo that you want to do whenever you have a window of opportunity to complete a combo that long.

The combo preceding it has a smaller multiplier, but is a shorter/faster combo string. Each charge attack in this string hits twice, so we'll add up both hits of the final charge attack, which comes out to 2830%. Comparing that to the 4285% of the later combo final hit, that means it does less damage, right? A shorter, faster combo should do less damage right? So why then does this combo do twice as much damage as the longer combo with a larger multiplier on a fully geared character?

That's where damage cap comes in, and in order to understand this we'll look at this helpful google document:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RnNLfdqFCW7zWvfHnQsNRJoi7EtIjdOUg-uYB0xsZHQ

Tabbing over to Vaseraga, we can see the modifier and the damage cap on each of his moves. While the modifiers vary greatly, gradually increasing the longer the combo, every single charged attack has the exact same damage cap (with the exception of the very first one). This is especially a problem for his second combo string because each charge attack in that string hits twice, making it literally twice as strong as his third combo string, and faster to boot. So if you're playing Vaseraga while leveling up, without a lvl 150 weapon, playing him optimally is intuitive and makes sense, and everything in his toolkit is situationally useful, but when you have strong enough gear to hit the damage cap on all his moves, the only thing worth doing is to spam combo B over, and over, and over again. While you will still use his skill to inflict slow, to give him invulnerability etc., Combo C becomes completely, and utterly useless, and most of his playstyle and toolkit becomes degraded because of this glaring oversight.

This is just one example, and while some characters optimal play stays safe from this problem (Ghandagoza), most characters are affected negatively at least a little bit by this problem, with Vaseraga only being one of the most egregious.

My solution to this problem is a common sense one: get rid of the damage cap and replace it with an attack cap. This game already has well designed attack values that for no logical reason whatsoever get undone by a very poor, hastily designed damage cap system which has catastrophic consequences for some playstyles. For example: due to this damage cap oversight, Rackam's strongest DPS makes him jump up and down spamming aerial strong attacks. Replacing damage cap with an attack cap would fix a massive amount of character and moveset balance in one fell swoop while retaining the limitations developers put on stacking pure offense.

[DaHedgehog27]

Game is gona have a serious problem if more and more content ever releases..

[Ebon Wolf]

An overhaul like this won’t happen until 6months+ if at all.

[Photon Shield]

Originally posted by Holden:

My solution to this problem is a common sense one: get rid of the damage cap and replace it with an attack cap.

Why not only get rid of the damage cap?

[Holden]

Originally posted by Photon Shield:

Originally posted by Holden:

My solution to this problem is a common sense one: get rid of the damage cap and replace it with an attack cap.

Why not only get rid of the damage cap?

Because that would require "an overhaul", unlike the solution I presented. The game has damage cap sigils, a damage cap terminus weapon series everyone uses in endgame, and more than that if you simply got rid of the damage cap without replacing it with anything the endgame bosses would die even faster than they already do. If you replaced dmg cap with an attack cap you wouldn't need to replace and redesign a lot of sigils and rebalance monster HP.

[Manslayer]

Yes, damage cap is a massive problem that is horribly balanced. The ironic thing is, assuming it was designed to combat everyone going pure damage, it just shoe horns everyone to ONE specific damage style. That is tot say, Supplementary Damage, damage cap, war elemental etc. Essentially to do max damage you just take the same things that allow you to bypass damage cap on some level.

This means most characters charge attacks suck, see Ferry where the cap on her charge attacks is the same as just attacking let alone jump-attack-dive attack, means you just do that optimal thing cause well... why would I charge my attack to do the same damage as just a normal attack.

[Matticus]

Its incredibly obvious the damage cap was one of the last things added to the game in a futile attempt to balance numbers that should have just been balanced at their base. Too many characters have had their optimal play styles degenerated to spamming a single attack, making them incredibly un-fun to play optimally. The game feels like its in a beta phase right now, and I really hope the developers dedicate resources to fixing it. How am I suppose to be excited for future character additions when they have a high chance of having their kit destroyed by the damage cap system? And we haven't even gotten to the exploit of bugs within character's kits yet.

[Holden]

Originally posted by Manslayer:

Yes, damage cap is a massive problem that is horribly balanced. The ironic thing is, assuming it was designed to combat everyone going pure damage, it just shoe horns everyone to ONE specific damage style. That is tot say, Supplementary Damage, damage cap, war elemental etc. Essentially to do max damage you just take the same things that allow you to bypass damage cap on some level.

This means most characters charge attacks suck, see Ferry where the cap on her charge attacks is the same as just attacking let alone jump-attack-dive attack, means you just do that optimal thing cause well... why would I charge my attack to do the same damage as just a normal attack.

The most shocking thing is that the damage cap per move is different proportionally than the multipliers. I cannot possibly fathom why this is the case and I can only assume this is an oversight by the developers. I'm totally convinced it's an oversight especially when I look through Vane's damage caps and almost every single move he has does the same amount of damage.

[Kriss Hietala]

I think level cap should have120 or 180 levels so we could use more sigils to extend the cap.

[Rail]

and then we have rackam, which has 2 broken moves and with broken I mean unintended dmg uncapped basically, and also siegfried which has 1/4 of the dmg of everyone else due to his insanely low dmg cap, this system has too many issues, it's a relic from the mobile game they wanted to bring in, but they ignored several factors implementing it into this game

[Kyutaru]

So damage caps don't exist to stop your ATK from going ludicrously high. They exist to stop people from buff and debuff stacking until they can deal overkill damage. That not only shifts to a meta of specific characters that can setup the optimal boss one shot kill attack, but it also makes raw DPS playstyles with few team support skills equipped suboptimal trash. Damage caps need to exist to keep certain characters and playstyles relevant.

There are tons of RPGs where players abuse buff/debuff stacking to go beyond the developer's intention. This is just the simplest way to combat that problem, by capping it.

[Holden]

Originally posted by Kyutaru:

So damage caps don't exist to stop your ATK from going ludicrously high. They exist to stop people from buff and debuff stacking until they can deal overkill damage. That not only shifts to a meta of specific characters that can setup the optimal boss one shot kill attack, but it also makes raw DPS playstyles with few team support skills equipped suboptimal trash. Damage caps need to exist to keep certain characters and playstyles relevant.

There are tons of RPGs where players abuse buff/debuff stacking to go beyond the developer's intention. This is just the simplest way to combat that problem, by capping it.

I tried very hard to make my case in the very first sentence to avoid people who don't read, but I guess it can't be helped if you don't read even the first sentence of the actual post.

[Kyutaru]

Originally posted by Holden:

Originally posted by Kyutaru:

So damage caps don't exist to stop your ATK from going ludicrously high. They exist to stop people from buff and debuff stacking until they can deal overkill damage. That not only shifts to a meta of specific characters that can setup the optimal boss one shot kill attack, but it also makes raw DPS playstyles with few team support skills equipped suboptimal trash. Damage caps need to exist to keep certain characters and playstyles relevant.

There are tons of RPGs where players abuse buff/debuff stacking to go beyond the developer's intention. This is just the simplest way to combat that problem, by capping it.

I tried very hard to make my case in the very first sentence to avoid people who don't read, but I guess it can't be helped if you don't read even the first sentence of the actual post.

And I tried to be civil, as I did read your entire post, but I guess it can't be helped if you don't remember one of your LAST sentences in your post:

Originally posted by Holden:

My solution to this problem is a common sense one: get rid of the damage cap and replace it with an attack cap.

[Holden]

I suppose you're correct that an attack cap, rather than damage cap would make defense down debuff have a purpose, rather than do literally nothing. I guess I'd ask that question to you: do you know if it stacks? Have you tested it? If Cagliostro and Charlotta apply defense down do they add together multiplicatively?

[Holden]

Regardless, the crux of the OP post is meant to illustrate how badly implemented the damage cap is, not an argument against the concept of limitations applied to a characters ability to deal damage.

[Chicken]

I mean Vase's combo B offer more DPS is kinda fair? the skill ratio is much more lower compare to combo C require more offensive skill to reach dmg cap. Combo C can reach dmg cap just by Vase existing(Awakened Terminus + Grynoth's atk up) and combo C offer higher stun power as well.