TL;DR
Equip the Painted Power Pictos. Its effect reads "Damage can exceed 9,999," and it is the only thing in the game that lifts the cap. You already own it if you have finished Act 2, because The Paintress drops it automatically. To let your whole party hit past 9,999, master the Pictos into a Lumina by winning 4 battles with it equipped, then slot the Lumina on each character for 5 Lumina Points. Once the cap is gone, single-hit nuke builds overtake the multi-hit builds you leaned on before.
The cap and the one item that removes it
Every hit in Expedition 33 is pinned at 9,999 damage. It does not matter whether your math says a skill should land for 40,000 or 4,000,000, the game clips it to 9,999 and moves on. No difficulty setting changes this on its own.
One item breaks it: item:painted-power, a Pictos whose tooltip says exactly "Damage can exceed 9,999." As a Pictos it also hands the wearer +1,844 Health, a strong sub-stat on its own. When you turn it into a Lumina, it costs only 5 Lumina Points, which makes it one of the best-value picks in the late game. Older guidance treated its cost as steep. It is not. At 5 LP you can run it on a character and still build a full Lumina page around it.
Where to get Painted Power
You get Painted Power automatically when you defeat item:paintress in The Monolith at the end of Act 2. No missable chest, no hidden vendor, no luck involved. Beat the boss that closes the second act and the Pictos lands in your inventory during the story sequence that follows in the Manor. If you are reading this after the credits, check your Pictos list, because it is already there. For the full route to that fight, see our Act 2 walkthrough.
That single fact answers the most common version of the question. Players keep asking "how do I go higher than 9,999" after the fight because the Pictos only solves the cap for one character. The rest of the party stays stuck at the ceiling until you take the next step.
Make it work for your whole party
Painted Power as a Pictos buffs only the character wearing it. Equip it on item:maelle and Maelle can crack 9,999, but item:lune, item:sciel, and the others still cap out. Most players miss this.
The fix is mastery. Keep Painted Power equipped on an active party member and win 4 battles. After the fourth win it unlocks as a Lumina, and a Lumina can be slotted on any character for 5 LP each. From that point every party member you choose can break the cap at the same time.
Two details make mastery painless:
- Mastery tracks per Pictos, not per character. Win two fights with it on item:gustave, move it to Lune, win two more, and the fourth win still completes mastery. You never re-grind because you swapped wearers.
- The Lumina carries the cap-removal passive, not the sub-stat. Other characters running the Lumina get the "exceed 9,999" effect but not the +1,844 Health. That Health bonus stays tied to whoever physically wears the Painted Power Pictos. Park the Pictos on a frontliner who wants the bulk, then hand the Lumina out to your damage dealers.
Why the cap change rewrites your build
Here is the part that matters more than the location. Removing the cap does more than let your numbers grow. It flips which builds are strongest.
Before Painted Power, multi-hit skills rule. When every individual hit locks at 9,999, a five-hit skill deals 49,995 while a single-hit skill that "wants" to deal 200,000 still lands for a flat 9,999. So the optimal play spreads damage across as many hits as possible and builds around hit count and AP economy. Multi-hit is the meta because the cap punishes putting all your power into one swing.
After Painted Power, single-hit nukes take over. With the ceiling gone, your full multiplier stack compresses into one uncapped number, and one big hit beats five medium ones. This is why a loaded Maelle item:stendhal can climb into the millions once the cap is off. The same build that capped at 9,999 a hit suddenly reads its true total.
[[build:XJKN4A]]
The jump is so large because of how the multipliers stack. Different sources multiply together, while bonuses from the same source add. Your attack-power buffs, stance multiplier, Pictos multipliers, crit, element affinity, target status, and your own conditions each form a bucket, and the buckets multiply against one another. Stack four or five of them and the product balloons, which the cap was hiding the whole time.
A few of the known multipliers worth building around:
| Source | Multiplier |
|---|---|
| Critical hit | 1.5x |
| Maelle Virtuose Stance | +200% (3x next action) |
| Lune Dark Stain | +50% per stack |
| Sciel Twilight | +25% per consumed charge |
Line up a crit inside Virtuose stance on a target that is Burning and Marked, and you can see why one swing leaves a capped five-hit combo far behind. The trick is sequencing the multipliers so they all land on the same action. The Maelle Stendhal build guide walks through that sequence, and the Lune Stain build and Sciel Twilight build show how each character's multipliers chain once the cap is gone.
A post-story alternative
If you want uncapped numbers without slotting Painted Power, the post-game Challenge Modifiers let you toggle uncapped damage as an optional setting once you have finished the story. It is a fine sandbox switch for messing around after the credits. For an actual run, Painted Power is the answer: it costs you nothing, you already have it, and at 5 LP it shares space with the rest of your kit instead of fighting it.