ARBITRARY DAMAGE CAP

Yeah, Yiazmat could full heal at ANY point I think. Yiazmat was dumb. I never bothered with him, and he's the ONLY one I never bothered with in FFXII (I swear I'm not going to make him that retarded in my game either...).

As for damage caps? I have no beefs with them, assuming they're done fine. Multi-hitting attacks are essentially a way to override the damage cap anyways (FFVI's X-Fight, Limit Breaks, Quick Hit, etc. to name a few). It's all just a matter of how the game handles its damage output and whatnot. For instance, Chrono Trigger handled this really well I feel (but it handles a lot of things well). Most attacks for most of the game won't really ever go above 1,000-1,500 damage (Dual and Triple Techs sometimes don't even go above 2,000-4,000 damage), and you'll rarely, if ever, see the 9,999 damage cap hit. But really? That's perfectly fine. If the game DIDN'T have a damage cap, then...well, that'd be pretty dumb I feel.

Meanwhile, a game like FFXII where bosses tend to get RIDICULOUS amounts of HP (Omega MK.XII, Yiazmat, Hell Wyrm, and King Behemoth all come to mind here) would've benefited more from having the damage cap removed for the player (instead, you have to use Genji Gloves to do that I think. And you only ever get one I believe?). Even FFXIII would've benefited from it, and I absolutely loathe that game.

...I am not the best at conversing, I realize this.

Yiazmat could only fully heal if you left him alone for too long. You could leave, save, and come back to him with his damage intact if you were fast.

I kind of agree with LockeZ on this one. Damage caps mean you acknowledge the math of whatever it is your doing doesn't scale well, and needs to be limited on the higher end. Caps on stats tend to be more forgivable, but if you have something in your game that can get your characters so far past acceptable stat levels that the game becomes broken, you have an issue anyway.

My favorite games tend to be ones with low numbers, and not a rapid amount of scaling. SMT games tend to be very low numbered, and while some do have damage 'caps', that also tends to be the max amount of HP allowed except for enemies. For the Persona games, this actually allows a difference between instant death spells (which can be resisted/nulled), and 'you done fucked up, now you die' effects that the optional bosses pull.

For Square styled games, it does tend to hard limit your growth. The biggest problem I'm having in Bravely Default at the moment is I ran into the damage cap long ago, and if anything isn't hitting damage cap consistently, it feels under powered...then again, I also hit level cap about 5 chapters ago, and am beginning to despise the repeat boss fights...so...

Quick Edit: I feel designers should aim to keep numbers low, and scaling equally low, because if nothing else it encourages players to experiment with non-direct damage more often. One of the biggest differences between SMT and Square games for me is the former heavily encourages status effects, buffs, debuffs, and focusing on weaknesses. In the latter, after the early game weaknesses don't matter, since everything is hitting max damage anyway, and barring FFXII and FFXIII-Series, buffs/debuffs don't tend to matter.

author=LockeZ
If you're bad at gameplay balance, damage caps can be a really simple bandaid for certain problems, since they can help ensure that your most important bosses at least survive long enough for the player to see them do some shit. It won't make the boss interesting or engaging, but it'll make it not so completely anticlimactic.

So, I can understand why amateurs would add damage caps to their games. I don't know why Final Fantasy 9 or any professional game has them.

I think it's a marketing gimmick for them at this point, they hooked us on quad 9's.

Now they are bringing the wagon hooooomme.