So whats the point of Communism?

It does not, it scales to stubbornness. (Though the comment in the XML suggests they accidentally had it put as "secondaryScale" instead of "primaryScale" originally, which would indeed make it scale to crit chance; presumably this was patched with the latest patch though.)

Also the guerilla attack always hits with the confuse effect (as opposed to eg 1 in X chance of confuse), but it's resistable, so they won't ALWAYS be confused.

 

what ARE the Communist debuffs?

 

Mainly they deduct cash, penalize stats/health regen and sap cold resistance/AA. Only the last one there is really dangerous, you can wind up doing 10-12 damage a turn to yourself with General Winter if you're not careful.

 

Yeah basically.

Although some of others also give resist penalties, so self criticism, for example, could be deadly if you are facing monsters that do existential damage (-6 resist ahhhhh)

Of course if you take magical law the Rationing one can be weaponized pretty easily...

 

There's the starting gear too - good stuff, that. Pick up dual wield and master of arms on game start, grab canadian healthcare in communism, and the first two floors are almost an afterthought. Beyond that, your mileage may vary.

 

I actually have been frequently incorporating Communism with my melee builds. I kind of like it. It's not something that I take all the time, nor is it usually something that's a priority to add points to (other than the first point, which I'll sometimes invest relatively early).

 

I've become a bit of a hater of Vanguard Party, unless I'm currently broke/poor anyways. I keep getting the stupid cash stealing debuff constantly. I'll turn VP on for situations where every little buff might help, but I don't leave it on 100% like I would, say, Fiscal Hedge on a Bankster character.

And yeah, as stated above pairing Communism with Dual Wield really kick starts your game. It's especially huge if for some reason you lack weapons skills and therefore would otherwise lack starter weapons.

 

The -money debuff can be handled easily with proper use of Dialectical Materialism. Same with all the other effects. Its utility doubles as a free random uncurse.

Overall, this tree is similar to Geology and Clockwork Knight in that it's a Warrior tree that both helps Offense and Defense. However, it's more defensive, and focused on giving raw stats.

Honestly, I think the OP is concerned about the balance of the skill than anything else. It has a cool concept - stat buffs and debuff handling, but doesn't seem to have a lot of power.

Seems is not is, though. One must keep in mind that increased stats generally have little visible impact; it's invisible power. So, it's easy to overpower, because a skill wants to achieve the feeling of having an impact. You know Geology is powerful because you smashed a Diggle with an uppercut made of stone.

Communism is a tree that will make you more survivable. That's what it does. Your melee attacks will get stronger, too.

I think it's consensus that the capstone is underpowered, though, and desperately needs a 400s cooldown bomb spawn, or something. This cooldown ought not to be affected by Magical Law's capstone, though. For, you know. Obvious reasons. Being able to have only one bomb on you might be kind of cool, or at least having The Bomb not stack, so you sacrifice inventory slots.

 

In theory, sure...but there seems to be something buggy with trying to remove commie debuffs via Dia Mat. On three consecutive occasions, I had the -money debuff and used Dia Mat.....nothing happened. Now its possible RNG boned me all three times and the random commie effect I got from Dia Mat just so happened to be the -money debuff, but still....it made me very wary of keeping Vanguard Party up if I didn't need it to be.

On a side note, Dia Mat did seem to remove stuff like DoTs and other curses just fine. Only saw weirdness when I tried to get rid of some of the commie ones (in particular the cash drain).

 

I've found commie lawyers to get around the debuff pretty well.

 

The big problem i have with a The Bomb cooldown is that you would just camp out holding [SPACE] all day while watching cartoons and stockpile 500000000 of them! Even if they couldn't stack you could just sock them away in your wizard portal.

Maybe if the capstone gave you more bombs.. like 5 .. it wouldnt be op? 3 ? I dunno. maybe the bomb payout could scale to character level..

 

Or you could just make it so that you could only have one bomb at a time. Even if you waited for the skill's timer to reach 0, fired it, got another and fired it too, you'd still only get two bombs at once. And it wouldn't be hard to make it so you'd have to wait for so-and-so-many turns after firing a bomb before you could make another one.

 

What's the use? one per dungeon floor is a much more elegant solution.

 

Maybe, but that doesn't mean it's more viable. Because we could change it to work the way I proposed, whilst your solution requires waiting for GLG guys to change it.

 

point taken, though I understand the beauty of it myself.

 

If the capstone gave you a recipe for the bomb needing 0 wandlore, I would dig it.

 

I'd love to get a free Bomb on ever level-up after taking that skill. Makes it quite attractive to rush to The Bomb...

 

Unfortunately, this change would then make it so you have to rush it, or you lose out on bombs. This is partially the problem with things like Fungal Arts and perception, but those are minor given you'll generally get enough shrooms/loot even if you max it later. However, without rushing The Bomb you would lose out on a huge amount of bombs.

Not to mention it's not possible to trigger effects based on levelling up, either.

 

Actually, I think the Bomb might be better if it just scaled to something. If I recall, none of the spell effects it triggers actually scale...

 

Why not stubbornness? Communism seems to like Stubbornness a lot.