http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AbsurdlyHighLevelCap

The Final Boss can be beaten at level 90.



A: Uh...something really really high. I was hoping by the time anyone reaches that point they would have decided that they've sufficiently beaten the game. — FAQ for RPG Shooter: Starwish Q: What is the maximum level?A: Uh...something really really high. I was hoping by the time anyone reaches that point they would have decided that they've sufficiently beaten the game.

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In many games with Character Levels, you'll probably won't need to reach the highest level possible in order to beat the game. Maybe this is just because of scaling and pacing of experience, or the game simply isn't long enough for you to naturally reach the maximum level. But sometimes, the highest possible level is so far beyond what's needed to beat the game that it would take hours upon hours of work just to reach it. When this happens, the game has an Absurdly High Level Cap.

This can make a player wonder why the developers bothered to make such a pointlessly out-of-reach level Cap. Sometimes, the bonuses or perks for leveling up past what's necessary to reach the end of the game start to become less effective. This results in a high level number that really isn't much different from lower levels. Other times, the perks get so incredible that reaching the maximum level allows a player to breeze through the game and remove all challenge. In this situation, reaching the cap just feels like overkill. (Then again, There Is No Kill Like Overkill.)

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The common "endgame level" tends to be around the "halfway mark", usually. In some games, this is actually where your stats begin to max out anyway.

Note that this is not just about games with really big numbers as the level cap, but for games where you won't get anywhere near the cap without absurd amounts of Level Grinding; a level cap of 999 wouldn't count if you can be reasonably expected to be at least level 950 by the time you reach the endgame. A level cap of 999 when you are expected to reach that level at the middle of the game would instead count as its opposite trope, Absurdly Low Level Cap. Conversely, a level cap of simply 30 would be absurdly-high if you only need to be level 10 to beat the game.

Note that Tropes Are Tools. This can be a useful gameplay feature for games with very open-ended and sandbox-like gameplay:

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In the age of DLC, modding, and expansion packs, game companies can add on (or have added on by modders) content that extends gameplay without needing to rework basic mechanics. Although games with expansions can just add "level cap upper" expansion packs.

Games can have "proper endings" to the plot achievable at lower levels, and then a Bonus Boss or even full-on Bonus Level of Hell that requires far higher levels to challenge, letting most players off with an ending while giving the hardcore players the additional challenge they seek.

If the player reaches the maximum level beforehand, a part of the game will have stagnated, thus taking away from the experience. After all, what is the point of receiving a reward in experience from a quest or mission if you have already maxed out your level?

It makes it hard to predict what level the character will be by the time they get around to finishing the main storyline or simply get bored of exploring.

In addition, some players see a rather high level cap as something to accomplish before they are truly finished playing, provided it does not require days of repetitive grinding for little to no payoff.

Contrast Absurdly Low Level Cap. Compare Overly Generous Time Limit for when it's a time limit that's ridiculously high.

Examples

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Action-Adventure Games

Most of the Metroidvania iterations of the Castlevania series end with the main character around level 50 (and the max being 99). In Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, the hardest respawning enemies in the game, the Guardians, only give 1 exp when you get to about level 70. After that, there's no point in grinding anymore. You take out the last boss in a few hits way before you reach 70. If you really want to try to max out your level after you hit 70, you can abuse full-screen hitting attacks in rooms with 10+ enemies, but even that takes close to an hour to get a single level. In Harmony of Dissonance, once you hit level 53, all non-boss enemies are worth 1 exp (and all bosses get to this point at level 59). Reaching Lv. 99 after that would take over a year of just killing bats. In Order of Ecclesia, after you beat Hard Mode Lv. 1 (the level cap is set at 1), you unlock the highest level cap, that being Lv. 255, as opposed to merely Lv. 99. Once one reaches around Lv. 80, even an entire run through the story won't get you even one level. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, as a Spiritual Successor, largely follows this trend. The level cap is 99, but a straight run through the story will probably end in the 30s. If you go out of your way to do everything, you might crack 60. The game even has an achievement for hitting 50.

Timespinner When the game was first released, there was no level cap for orbs, allowing them to level up so high that it crashed the game. This was eventually patched to where there is a cap at level 999, though it's still absurdly high, since the game can be finished with orb levels in the low thirties. The max level of main character Lunais is level 100, in a game that can be beaten pretty comfortably at level 40. Even the True Final Boss goes down fairly easily at around level 60, and the hardest difficulty level isn't much of a challenge at around level 70.



First-Person Shooter

Battlefield is a somewhat notorious case for this - Battlefield 2 in particular has the player go through 21 ranks, but the low amount of points gained per kill makes it take forever to actually rank up without going to specific point-farming servers. The requirements, in fact, were actually lowered when it was discovered that the highest-scoring player account - which was actually multiple people playing on one account so they could play more often than normal - would still take two years to reach the highest rank.

Borderlands 1: The main story will get you to about level 30, but the level cap is 50. These extra levels were intended for your New Game+. Borderlands 2 and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! continue this trend, but Borderlands 3 subverts it. If you do all the sidequests and Circles of Slaughter, you should be edging right at the level cap when you finish the game. The story DLC packs raise the level cap, and if you start the DLC at the old cap you should be at the new one by the end.

Where the overall cap is, if one exists, for Overwatch is not entirely certain, but players can continue earning new player portraits all the way up to level 2391.

Played with by the Call of Duty franchise, starting with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (well, the console versions; PC didn't get to do that until World at War). Players are able to level up (the cap is different for each game), unlocking new weapons, support equipment, and Perks as they go. At the maximum level, the player has the option to "Prestige", reverting to level 1, essentially starting again. Later games use this to unlock unique cosmetic elements and extra Custom Class slots, but CoD4 simply let you start climbing the ladder again, up to five times, not really gaining much of anything for your trouble. With Call of Duty ELITE for consoles, it's now possible to have your 1000 hours of gameplay time actually shown to the world. Plus, though Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 started with 10 Prestige levels, people were getting to Prestige 10 and had nothing further to show, so it was increased to 15th Prestige, then 20th Prestige. At 80 levels a Prestige, that means leveling up 1600 times.

Halo: Reach, while having the average-ish 50 ranks, requires 20 million experience points to hit the level cap, the distance between rank 49 and 50 being 3 and a half million alone.

PAYDAY 2 has one by way of its "Infamy" system. The normal level cap, the one for actually unlocking skill points and weapons and the like is 100, which isn't that difficult to hit (even up to the midway point, Overkill-difficulty heists can get you ten or so levels at once). Where it gets into the absurdly-high territory is with Infamy, in which you reset your level for small bonuses and start over, keeping your weapons already in your inventory but requiring going through the ranks again to regain access to them. In the initial release of the Infamy system, there were five tiers to Infamy, granting a total of 600 levels, with plans to eventually move on up to 14 Infamy tiers for 1500 levels in total — and when "Infamy 2.0" eventually hit, it came with 25 tiers instead, bringing the total level cap up to 2600. Worse, the number of infamy levels added with 2.0 meant they had to drop the playing-card-deck theme they had planned for the system, and with it any real reason to go through every infamy level — whereas the opening five levels have noticeable (though still rather small) bonuses applied, note New masks, bonuses to your chance of Infamous items, and bonuses that decrease the amount of skill points needed to advance to a new tier of skills in the Fugitive skill tree and another one of your choice — and the latter bonus stacks, so by Infamy 5 you get that bonus permanently for all five skill trees , Infamy 6 through 25 grant little more than the occasional mask and more experience bonuses, giving advancing through further Infamy levels little reason to exist other than to make it easier to advance through even further Infamy levels.

, Infamy 6 through 25 grant little more than the occasional mask and more experience bonuses, giving advancing through further Infamy levels little reason to exist other than to make it easier to advance through even further Infamy levels. Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 features the ACES system, which rewards you for specific actions in-game by granting you new weapons that are specialized towards that playstyle, e.g. close-range shotguns and submachine guns for killing enemies in close range or from behind. Once you reach level 20 in one of the specializations, you have everything that can be unlocked through it, but the levels continue going up to 100, with the only reason to keep grinding out ACES kills being that they grant flat experience bonuses, which is good for quickly rising through the regular ranks that grant new pieces of armor or other cosmetics to dress Bishop up with.

Time Warpers: Your units can reach up to level 40000. You can typically beat zone 5000 at 16500, which is also the last zone you need to clear for an achievement. Even then, if you decide to go for zone 10000 in the post game, level 40000 is far from needed, with you only needing somewhere between 35000-36000.

Hack and Slash

In Diablo II, the pace of experience slows down to a crawl by the mid-80s. A handful of people do reach 99, but it takes an insanely long time. Most characters will have attained optimal skills long before this. This is because shortly after it was released, Diablo II ended up with hundreds of Level 99 Hardcore Barbarians on Battle.net, much to the chagrin of the game designers who were certain reaching level 99 in Hardcore (where dying even once permanently ended your game) was impossible. Several nerfs to the signature Barbarian skill (Whirlwind) were applied, only for other game-breaking abilities to be uncovered in other character classes. Finally, they simply applied a patch that set all experience gains for level 80 or higher characters to be 1/10th normal, all past level 90 to be 1/100th normal, and past level 95 to be 1/1000th normal (most non-boss enemies, even on Hell difficulty, give only one experience point per kill at that level). By mathematically guaranteeing that players would need to kill 10 enemies per second, 24 hours a day, for nearly a year to go from level 98 to level 99, they finally succeeded in killing off interest in attaining the maximum level.

Its sequel Diablo III also applies. Pre-patch 1.0.4 the cap was at level 60. Patch 1.0.4 added 100 extra "Paragon" levels note (which permanently increase your character's Gold Find and Magic Find in addition to the usual stat increases) on top of that, so yes, the cap is now at level 160. Considering that monsters are the same when capped at level 60, you can guess how hard is to get level 160 (the game designers try to make it as hard as getting level 99 in the previous game). To put this in perspective: it takes about 23.5 million XP to reach level 60. Getting to Paragon 100 requires nearly 10.5 billion XP — enough experience to level 445 characters to the original level cap. After patch 2.0, though, the level cap on paragon levels is entirely gone, meaning the player can keep leveling up into infinity. Even then, after a certain point, the levels become mostly meaningless. Each paragon level now gives the player a chance to level up one of sixteen stats, and each one can only be leveled up fifty times, except for a base damage stat and a defense stat. By Paragon Level 800, the player will have maxed out every stat except the base stats, so grinding past that point will result in a (by that point) insignificant stat growth, when the players characters are so strong, they're basically unkillable.

on top of that, so yes, the cap is now at level 160. Considering that monsters are the same when capped at level 60, you can guess how hard is to get level 160 (the game designers try to make it as hard as getting level 99 in the previous game). To put this in perspective: it takes about 23.5 million XP to reach level 60. Getting to Paragon 100 requires nearly 10.5 XP — enough experience to level characters to the original level cap. The Dynasty Warriors franchise of games usually have ridiculously high level caps, with the main Dynasty Warriors series usually sitting at level 99. Pirate Warriors has an initial level cap of 50. However, this cap can be broken by collecting the right Coins and Limit-Breaking your character, allowing them to progress past level 50 and up to the real level cap of 100. Doing so allows the character's stats to continue increasing and unlocks new combo finishers for them. Hyrule Warriors: Both the original and Legends set a default level cap of 99, with updates gradually raising it to 150, 200, and finally 255; and Definitive Edition just sets it to 255 to begin with. However, where most of the basic Adventure Mode map can be completed with level 30-50 characters, the additional DLC maps and a select few of the Level 3 weapon stages on the basic map can still be difficult with levels around 60-70. Although, it's safe to say that once you do reach 255, most of the game will pose little to no trouble.

Gauntlet Dark Legacy had a level cap of 99, even though the game could be beaten by level 60 or so.

Path of Exile has a level cap of 100 and exponentially growing EXP requirements for the highest levels, along with 5%/10% of your EXP progress to the next level being lost when dying on higher difficulties. Almost 3 years after the game's release (and with 11.5 million registered users), the "Standard" league has only 826 characters on level 100. Similar to its spiritual predecessor Diablo II, optimized character builds generally don't require reaching the level cap to be effective.

MMORPG

The original MMORPG example was Asheron's Call — the level cap was logarithmic, with the hard cap on experience being 4 billion at level 127. Given that the game was launched at the same time as Everquest, which had a level 50 cap, this was rather jarring for the time. It took most of a decade for any character to actually reach the cap, although MMORPG inflation made it easier a few years after that. A later update changed the cap again — to 4 billion experience points per skill, putting the actual level cap near 300.

Battlestar Galactica Online has a cap of 250 in a game where it takes weeks for all but the most dedicated or money-throwing players to hit 20!

Bots, before it got taken down, had a level cap of around 2900.

EVE Online has close to 400 skills, which while only have 5 levels each, can take upwards of a month or more to max each skill. Depending on how you set up your characters, it'll take 20+ years to skill up everything to level 5 if no new skills are ever introduced.

Everquest now has a level cap of 100. This may seem low compared to other games in the genre, but keep in mind that, even with the regular "exp smoothing" administered to the game in recent years, it still takes an absurdly long time to reach that 100 cap. And that's not even getting into Alternate Advancement points, which, while easier to get than general levels by a wide margin, only have a theoretical cap (and one imposed by the game on silver accounts) that inevitably expands each time an expansion hits whether or not the level cap is raised. Everquest II has a very similar system.

In Granblue Fantasy, the current maximum Player Rank (the main character's equivalent of Character Levels) is 225, yet Rank 101 is enough to unlock the ability to host and join most Impossible Raids, which serve as endgame content for high-level players. A new set of raids, the Magna 2 bosses were introduced in 2018, yet their Player Rank pre-requisite for hosting and joining is set to 120 and above.

In The Infinite Black, there is no hard level cap, but experience gained from kills gradually reduces for each level gained, while the amount of XP required to level up increases, creating a soft cap. The highest-level characters of the most dedicated players can reach the 300s with years of work, but Ultimate-tier gear only requires Level 30 to equip.

The level cap in Kingdom of Loathing is 256. You're expected to clear the main game at level 13, though you can still earn new skills until level 15. There's a trophy for reaching level 30 for each class, and players looking to complete a particular sidequest might grind until level 20-35, depending on how much money they're willing to spend on buffs. Actually reaching the level cap was something only a few players accomplished for most of the game's lifetime, until a certain donation item introduced an area with procedurally-generated enemies that made that sort of long-term powerleveling much easier . Even now, very few people actually do it because there's very little reason — it used to be a reasonable PvP strategy, but shortly after the release of that item, PvP got revamped in a way that completely destroyed its viability. note Formerly, when engaging in PvP, you could pick a stat to lead off with, and the rest of the battle would be six arbitrary-goals comparisons picked randomly from a set of twelve, or you could pick Ballyhoo and replace the stat test with a seventh arbitrary comparison. Players at the level cap would, of course, always win a stat test. After the revamp, the stat tests were removed entirely, and players engaging in PvP just pick one of the twelve arbitrary comparisons to lead off with, and being at the level cap almost never helps with any of them.

. Even now, very few people actually do it because there's very little reason — it used to be a reasonable PvP strategy, but shortly after the release of that item, PvP got revamped in a way that completely destroyed its viability. In Lost Souls MUD, the maximum level is 675. According to developers, the limit only exists because of integer overflow problems on XP values, and if anybody were to actually reach level 675, experience would be re-implemented using floating point math, removing the cap.

In Mabinogi, reaching the level cap is most likely impossible, as the ideal way to level is by rebirthing back to level 1 every week or so, adding to the total level. Some say the total level cap may exceed 9000. Apparently, the "current level" cap is 200. The exploration level cap is definitely 25. But all that really matters for are those who seek to gain as much AP as possible in as little time as possible. The maximum you can get each week while still having a life outside the game doesn't even get close to the cap until your total is many thousands high and your character a veritable engine of destruction already.

Neocron and its expansion/sequel didn't even have levels in the traditional sense. The two numbers which denoted a player's average power (expressed as X/Y ) was dependent on multiple factors, such as the currently equipped weapon (influencing X) and the amount of levels a character had obtained in the five skills (Strength, Constitution, PSI Power, Intelligence and Dexterity, influencing Y to some extent). However, despite the four classes having varying caps for each of these, the total amount of levels spread across them all amounted to an identical 300. For the classes which had caps of 100 in certain skills (everyone except the Private Eye class), the amount of experience required to gain one level after hitting the low-nineties was in eight or nine figures. In a heavily PvP-focused game, this meant a lot of grinding of the highest-level areas, usually in groups. The grind was, however, exacerbated if a player made the decision to respec from one discipline into another (for instance, a Spy wanting to quit using rifles in favour of pistols). In addition to having to buy specific "Loss-of-Memory" (referred to as LOM) pills for the subskill they wished to remove the skill points from, the pills themselves only removed the points five at a time and incurred the game's "Synaptic Impairment" effect (the only way to get a stronger degree of the SI than the LOM pills is dying). This meant that there was a few minutes wait before the player could pop the next pill, meaning that respeccing a high-level character literally took hours to do. Add this to the fact that a fully-capped character usually un capped themselves due to the pills snatching away a bit of XP every time...

) was dependent on multiple factors, such as the currently equipped weapon (influencing X) and the amount of levels a character had obtained in the five skills (Strength, Constitution, PSI Power, Intelligence and Dexterity, influencing Y to some extent). However, despite the four classes having varying caps for each of these, the total amount of levels spread across them all amounted to an identical 300. In Phantasy Star Online, you can plausibly play through the entire story on even the highest difficulty level at about level 80 or so, especially if you're playing online or multiplayer. The level cap is 200. It isn't as bad as it seems. There's no diminishing return. Rather, people rarely hit 200 because you have so many character slots. That and the fact that, even earning XP at the fastest possible rate, it takes close to 1000 hours to reach the Level 200 mark... To give an idea of how ridiculous Phantasy Star Online is for this trope, Level 200 requires 82 million experience points in a game where enemies on the highest difficulty seldom give more than 400 XP a pop. And thanks to the exponential experience requirements for level-ups, you pass the halfway mark to the level cap at Level 182...

Ryzom has a level cap of 250, which in a normal MMO wouldn't be too bad as your stats tend to max out at that level, and even with four fields to hit the cap in (Fighting, Magic, Crafting, and Foraging) your stats and level remain fairly similar. Unfortunately, these four fields branch in to insanely complex skill-trees, ending with more than 50 fields to hit the level cap in, a feat that can take years.

In Shin Megami Tensei IMAGINE, the level cap is 97 (98 in the japanese server), but to get from 95 to 96 you need more experience than from 1 to 95. And then to get from 96 to 97 you need two times the experience you needed to go from level 1 to 96.

In the Third-Person Shooter MMO S4 League reaching level 100 and "S4" rank requires 63,703,100 EXP. The most experience you can gain from a 30 minute match is 1280 exp so it is estimated that you would need over 1036 days of continuous nonstop optimal playing. Of course, Alaplaya has included Anti Poop-Socking features that cut off all exp and pen gains after playing 8 hours per day. Luckily levels don't matter at all obtain weapons which are given out for free or purchased at the shop for extremely cheap prices. The only things that are affected by levels are the channels players can participate in and clothes that change the appearance of the player. All clothes give the same bonuses so levels stop mattering at all after level 20.

Platformer

The level cap in Azure Striker Gunvolt is 99, but most players will be around level 30-40 by the time they challenge the final level. The last unlockable unlocks at Level 65, but the last 34 levels are pointless beyond getting even more HP than you could possibly need (especially when high-level play encourages you to not get hit at all for maximum Kudos potential).

Ratchet: Deadlocked: Not really a level cap, but since HP is upgraded by gaining experience, it counts as a variation. In Challenge mode, your HP can be upgraded all the way to 999. For comparison, the maximum HP obtainable in the previous games was 8/80/200. Needless to say, it'll take a lot of playthroughs to get there, even with ten XP-mods on your weapons.

Real-Time Strategy

Age of Empires III: The shipments from the Home City in the Campaign mode. You pick a card with supplies or upgrades that can be sent to your settlement. After a certain amount of Experience, you can unlock another card and place it in your deck. In Skirmishes this is capped at 20 cards. In Campaign, it is 44. Short of cheat codes, it is extremely difficult to achieve enough Experience to unlock all 44 cards.

Roguelike

Ancient Domains of Mystery only has character levels go up to 50, but weapon skills, on the other hand, go from 'unskilled' to 'grandmaster'. Most PCs will never reach grandmaster within the span of a single game, but those that do are unbelievably fearsome with their chosen weapon.

If there is a cap in Dungeons of Dredmor no one has found it yet, you can comfortably beat the game in around the mid 20 range and you stop gaining stats from your levels if you don't have anywhere to spend your skill points, so even if you grind, your level ups become pointless at around the 30+ mark. At ridiculously high levels ◊ , the XP bar will begin freaking out and demand more XP than a player is ever likely to gain across all their characters and then start rolling back to zero if you keep going. The jump from 98 to 99 alone takes 197828720 XP. The game just was not built with anyone reaching those kinds of levels in mind.

Simulation Games

In Heartache 101 ~Sour Into Sweet~ , the player's stats can be raised up to a cap of 100. The three uses of stats are to pass storyline checkpoints (which use a simple "Is the stat higher than this value" pass-or-fail check), to give correct advice to girls when asked (where points in the relevant stat increase the chance of Ferdinand's advice being correct), and to determine how many relationship points are gained when spending time with girls. Storyline checkpoints never require any value higher than 50, advice will reach 100% chance of being correct somewhere between 50 and 60, and it is possible to max out relationship values for girls without any stats ever even reaching 50.

Third-Person Shooter

Splatoon: The 2.0.0 update raised the game's level cap to 50, even though all weapons and gear is unlocked by original cap of level 20. There are additional pieces of gear rewarded every five levels past 20, but said clothing has no unique traits that can't be found from others in the store. And assuming you gain experience in the most efficient way possible (winning every ranked match you play without ever going into overtime) it'll take you over 90 hours of play time (not counting time spent between matches) to go from level 20 to level 50. Splatoon 2 goes even further by having the original level cap be 99, despite being able to unlock everything by Level 30. Then the 2.0.0 update allowed any players that somehow managed to get to that level cap to essentially prestige ala Call of Duty to reach a new level cap of 99★. However, every new level from 30 onward grants the player Super Sea Snails, which can be used in lieu of cash to help augment gear abilities. And for the curious, playing in the most efficient way possible, i.e. winning every Ranked Mode match within five minutes via knockout, getting to 99★ from Level 1 would take about 582 hours of playtime (not counting time spent between matches).

Warframe: Every weapon and warframe maxes out at level 30, and you can reach that with half a day's grinding. Character level also maxes out at level 30, but since the only way to level that is by leveling weapons and warframes, it takes much longer. In fact, by 2019 (six years after the game's release) the effective max character level was only 27, because there flat-out were not enough weapons to get it any higher. Even getting to that point takes months of grinding, at a minimum.

Tower Defense

Bloons Tower Defense 4 has a rank cap of 94. Sure, it doesn't seem so big, until you realize that the last two level requirements skyrocket into the outer space and beyond. Note To elaborate, rank 92 needs 30 billion XP. Rank 93, one trillion XP. Rank 94? Ten quadrillion XP.

Both Cursed Treasure flash games have a very high level cap, but the highest level you'd ever want is Level 41, as that's the minimum level needed to max out all the skills. However, the most EXP gained from a single map is nearly 1,700 (at least, that's the case for the Level Pack), and since EXP needed for the next level is current level x 100 note for example, EXP needed for Level 18 is 17 x 100 = 1,700 , that means repeating that map many, many times. Worse, you'll likely get a Brilliant rating on all the maps way before maxing out all your skills!

, that means repeating that map many, many times. Worse, you'll likely get a Brilliant rating on all the maps way before maxing out all your skills! There is no level cap in Gemcraft; instead, it has a cap on how much experience you can get due to the fact beating the same field twice gives you only difference between your new and old record - fail to beat it and you get nothing. Downplayed in The Forgotten due to the fact it's much harder to grind than in the later games. You can reach the last level as early as late 50s, but if you go out of your way to grind on all levels, you will likely reach it with level somewhere in 80s, which will allow you to max out most of the skills. Maxing out all skills in Gem of Eternity requires your level to somewhere around 200. This is much higher than the level required to beat the game, but also nowhere the level you can get by grinding as much as you can. This entry is unique in the fact that each of the level's battle modes are considered to be unique for the purpose of gaining levels. In Labyrinth and Chasing Shadows it's high enough to make even Disgaea hang its head in shame. By stacking difficulty, talisman bonuses, and battle settings/traits, you can gain billions of XP per level. and with 169 fields in Labyrinth and up to 191 in Chasing Shadows (including Magician's Pouch-exclusive and Steam-exclusive fields), your wizard level can get absurdly high. The soft level cap is generally considered to be somewhere around Level 10,000 in Labyrinth and 50,000 in Chasing Shadows.



Turn-Based Strategy

Tabletop Games

Since the release of the Epic Level Handbook in Dungeons & Dragons 3.0, there literally was NO level cap. You could make a level 1 million wizard if you took the time out to do it (although it would be useless because no sane Dungeon Master would ever let you use it, or put the time into running a campaign where it could be used), but still technically possible. In practice, it's difficult to get a character from level one all the way to twenty. In a pencil and paper RPG, real life tends to disrupt the game before that point and if you're lucky you have a group that can play once a week. Be grateful if you have a DM motivated enough to keep the game going that long. Also, modules and monsters written for this level are less common. For this reason, Pathfinder (a.k.a. "D&D 3.75") hasn't yet released rules that go beyond this level (aside from a brief few paragraphs for just in case.) And their adventures paths take characters from level one to about level sixteen. On top of this, the power level of monsters tended to be highly erratic at higher levels given that they started to have increasing numbers of powers that simply outright killed the target on top of having durability and damage outputs that increased at a much more rapid rate than the player characters did, making encounters increasingly difficult to actually make fun the higher level a party got. For all of 5th Edition's official game modules, the intent is having the party start at 1st level and be up to about 13th-15th by the end of the adventure. Once you hit the cap, the expectation is clearly that the party will want to start a new module with fresh characters, actual published material for parties above that level is practically nonexistent. The third-party Immortals Handbook contains encounters and adventures for characters of levels well into the hundreds. One wonders the kind of screwed-up XP charts that would result in such an insane level system existing. Older versions placed level caps on the classes of nonhumans, as an attempt to balance against their racial abilities. The result was essentially this and Absurdly Low Level Cap combined. If the campaign wasn't going to hit the cap, it didn't balance anything. If it was, the cap would make your character worthless. This could also be said about certain classes before 4th Edition. Due to Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards, players of Wizards and similar classes had to put up with being very weak in comparison to other classes until at least level 5 or so. Once it got into the teens, Fighters and Rogues might as well stay at home. Like in racial caps, this meant that a lot of short-lived campaigns meant that wizards never got rewarded for sticking it out through the low levels, whereas longer-lived and/or high-level campaigns saw non-magical classes become obsolete. 4th Edition's solution to solve all of this was to make most classes nearly identical.....which did not go over well. 5th Edition's solution was to smooth out wizards and other casters so they were more powerful at lower levels and not so over-powered at higher levels, mostly by fixing the effects of spells at a medium power level(unless using a higher slot). This has generally worked much better, but YMMV whether it really makes higher-level play in the teens still feel like a natural level progression without an unofficial "cap".

The power level stat in Exalted, Essence, has an soft cap of 10. Most magical beings (including the majority of player characters) begin their existence with Essence of 2 and have relative caps. The most common way to increase Essence is through age and extensive meditation — until a character is 100 years old, they may reach up to Essence 5 with each increase taking months equal to the new rating. To reach Essence 10, the character must be several thousands of years old and devote a year of nothing but meditation for the final enlightenment. Characters can go on world-saving (or destroying) adventures even at Essence 5. Theoretically, one can go for higher Essence ratings than 10, but the authors do not see the point of providing rules for those eventualities.

The old BECMI Dungeons and Dragons series had a level cap of 36 but you can evolve into a four-dimensional immortal being with the last ruleset, Immortal, telling you how to play this. You can then reach the top of the of the immortal hierarchy and become leader of your faction. However, there is more, if you become leader of your faction and give away all your power to be born a perfectly normal mortal and succeed in becoming a immortal again and then succeed in becoming leader of your faction and then give away all your power again, you will apparently be hunted down and destroyed irrevocably. This has only happened twice ever in the history of the immortals. You are not really destroyed, but recreated as something called an Old One something that is to immortals what an immortal is to a human -way too powerful for a human to imagine or role-play so the game ends. The Immortal module, however, hints that there is something beyond even Old Ones. Reaching this would require a LOT of time and a Dungeon Master who has a even more time and a lot of creativity since he must create almost all the Immortal level material and adventures himself.

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