The point of the damage cap?

[Haseo]

I've never really been sure of what the purpose of the damage cap has been since its inception. I know private servers use high damage as a means of catching hackers, but this is a cap so it's not really the same. I thought about it and decided it might be for balance issues, but however much the cap is right now is pretty imbalanced in itself. Unless I am getting things wrong.

What is the point of the damage cap exactly? It just seems to gimp single hit skill utility and do nothing past that.

[Shidoshi]

It's the same as the meso cap, they assign a maximum number of bits to contain the damage information. For our current cap it's probably 19 bits so it can go up to 2^20 - 1 which is roughly 1m.

[Haseo]

I didn't know how it worked, thanks for that. But the main question was 'why even have a damage cap in the first place?'.

Unless you mean to say that it's like that because they couldn't/didn't wanna spare more bits or something...

[Locked]

..Er.
There is no "19 bit" number in here, lol.
The damage cap is just a limit the game puts for whatever reason. Most likely balance, if anything. Certain skills can break the damage cap such as Pierce, Arrow Bomb, Summons and that wild hunter rush skill I can't think of.

[Kalovale]

There's no reason to cap at 19 bit. Of course you can, but there's no reason to. I believe the game just goes commando and caps damage at 999999, possibly to combat hacks.

[Dark Link]

But, but...what about that Meso Explosion damage bug that occurred in KMST a long ass time ago?

[Liteness]

i too don't see the point of damage cap cause anyone with higher hits will always do more damage even though you could be stronger than they are

[Link]

If there wasn't any sort of damage cap, bosses would fall too easily. With the cap on HP being 2.1 billion, having players do much more than they already do will mean things will just fall apart too easily. I mean, look at Chaos Pink Bean... They can't make it "difficult" enough with 2.1 billion HP, so they have Pink Bean respawn when he dies so it resets the HP count.

The game would require some reworking for those values to be able to be increased. I don't think Nexon Korea cares enough to do that.

[Haseo]

There's no reason to cap at 19 bit. Of course you can, but there's no reason to. I believe the game just goes commando and caps damage at 999999, possibly to combat hacks.

But I've never seen anyone in the real servers hack their damage to 999999. And even if they did, that degree of damage is broken and unbalanced in its own right.

If there wasn't any sort of damage cap, bosses would fall too easily. With the cap on HP being 2.1 billion, having players do much more than they already do will mean things will just fall apart too easily. I mean, look at Chaos Pink Bean... They can't make it "difficult" enough with 2.1 billion HP, so they have Pink Bean respawn when he dies so it resets the HP count.

The game would require some reworking for those values to be able to be increased. I don't think Nexon Korea cares enough to do that.

That is a valid point, but it's ridiculously difficult and expensive to hit beyond the cap in the first place, isn't it?

Also, IMO, if anyone is opulent enough to spend that much money on potential to the point that they can consistently hit beyond the damage cap on 7 hit skills, they kinda deserve to. But that's just my opinion.

[Taarie]

Is there for balancing purpose, is easier for developers to make content knowing there's a damage cap, that way they can create a sense of difficulty when making new bosses.

[Stereo]

But I've never seen anyone in the real servers hack their damage to 999999. And even if they did, that degree of damage is broken and unbalanced in its own right.

It's uncommon, if the damage cap was, say, high enough to 1 hit PB, maybe there would be more effort invested. But "legitimate" gear on a hacked character can get you to the damage cap, so why bother?


It is of course possible to do 8-9 digit damage, there's no 19 bit cap..

(Bamboo hits 30% of hp, so that's 50,400,000)

[SwordStaker]

I also thought it would balance the game. Like @Link said it could break the game. Imagine a Merc instead of hitting 2m per Ishtar shot hit 20m. That would be a little wayyy too much..

[valhala556]

I also thought it would balance the game. Like @Link said it could break the game. Imagine a Merc instead of hitting 2m per Ishtar shot hit 20m. That would be a little wayyy too much..

that would give them the idea to actually balance power some. I would think anyway.

[inemnitable]

It's a longstanding tradition in RPGs for damage/stats/etc. to be capped at a certain number of digits--see every Final Fantasy game ever, just to name a few examples. There doesn't seem to be any real technical reason for damage to be capped at 6 digits--Maple tends to use signed 32 bit ints everywhere (why signed I have no clue, it's not like there's any negative numbers in the game). 6 digits is probably pretty much the limit of numbers people the magnitude of which people can distinguish quickly without commas/other separators, but I'm not sure if that's something Nexon is really thinking about. Most likely it's more about having *some* kind of hard cap on power level. It used to be 5 digits when that was hard to get to for most classes, but of course they had to raise it or their precious big bang and potential system would have been worthless. Then again they keep subverting it by making more and more classes which "circumvent" the damage cap by way of multi-hit or hurricane-type skills so in some sense you wonder if the one hand knows what the other hand is doing.

Based on the way they keep revamping classes to hit less damage more times, I'd say the cap isn't going anywhere any time soon.

[Dusk]

Maple tends to use signed 32 bit ints everywhere (why signed I have no clue, it's not like there's any negative numbers in the game).

It's good practice to use consistent typing; if HP was an unsigned 32 bit int and damage was a signed 32 bit int, you would have to do conversions every time you wanted to modify one variable using the other. Generally, it's best to stick to 32 bit ints unless you have a good reason to do otherwise.

[inemnitable]

It's good practice to use consistent typing; if HP was an unsigned 32 bit int and damage was a signed 32 bit int, you would have to do conversions every time you wanted to modify one variable using the other. Generally, it's best to stick to 32 bit ints unless you have a good reason to do otherwise.

Well power creep shows that signed 32 bit ints was a bad decision.

[yo72]

Well power creep shows that signed 32 bit ints was a bad decision.

1mil dmg cap isn't a horrible idea, having one item triple your damage on bosses is a bad decision

[inemnitable]

1mil dmg cap isn't a horrible idea, having one item triple your damage on bosses is a bad decision

Bosses with a maximum hp of 2^31 - 1 hasn't turned out so well, though.

[yo72]

Bosses with a maximum hp of 2^31 - 1 hasn't turned out so well, though.

How so? Nexon just needs to rebalance their game, and make bosses more then just sandbags to throw DPS at, or only sandbags during 20secsonds out of a minute

[Polantaris]

It's good practice to use consistent typing; if HP was an unsigned 32 bit int and damage was a signed 32 bit int, you would have to do conversions every time you wanted to modify one variable using the other. Generally, it's best to stick to 32 bit ints unless you have a good reason to do otherwise.

The only part that doesn't make sense is why they would need a signed int at all. I can't think of a single instance where a negative value is ever used. They could have easily used simple checks to make sure that when subtracting, they didn't go below 0 (Which I believe makes it wrap around to max? I forget, it's been a long time since I've needed to care about such an event). If they had, bosses could have more HP, there could be a higher Meso Limit (Which in the case of non-KMS versions would probably be a bad thing but that's regardless), and all kinds of other limits would be better.

That being said, Damage doesn't hit the cap signed or unsigned. It's a cap used so that people cannot be TOO powerful. Can you imagine someone who cashed so much that he does hundreds of millions a hit, or more? Having a damage cap allows Nexon to control damage while still making cashing insanely profitable in terms of DPS. There's huge amounts of improvement possible, but you can't get SO powerful that everything dies in seconds or less. If they want an ability to be able to do more than 1m an attack, they just give it more hits. If they think it does too much, they lower the hits. It's actually really pretty simple, from Nexon's side of things.

How so? Nexon just needs to rebalance their game, and make bosses more then just sandbags to throw DPS at, or only sandbags during 20secsonds out of a minute

That's asking Nexon to work. Such blasphemy.