Thoughts on Banksterism

YOU SAW NOTHING!!!

 

I'm pretty sure most of my complaints about Bankster have been voiced already, but in general I find the biggest headaches to be:

• Imhotep's Pyramid Scheme makes playing Bankster w/o Egyptian Magic (a counter-intuitive combo if you ask me) no fun at all. I love that the combo exists, but I hate that I'm stuck with two trees that have AN EXPLETIVE-FILLED TON of redundant activated abilities that make my hot-bar a hot-mess.

• Insurance Fraud is a dead level at rank 3 and should be far later in the tree so that you aren't forced to take it until you're on a floor that it gives reasonable returns on. Alternatively, finding a way to roll it in so that it's a passive that dovetails off of High Interest Loan would save on hotbar real-estate and make it feel like I'm not wasting two turns to pop HIL and IF when they both ultimately do they same thing: generate more 'mids. Alter-alternatively I-Fraud could swap places with HIL and one or both of them tweaked accordingly

• I have had a hit-or-miss experience with Fiscal Hedge: sometimes I'm so loaded with zorkmids that the cost in insignificant, other times it is a struggle to keep enough money around to use it at all. Most of the time, however, I never even get to it because I can't force myself to take Insurance Fraud because it's so bad.

EDIT: What if Insurance Fraud was an AoE ability? I could have fun with that...
EDIT II: Also, there's ALOT of repetitive clicking involved with Bankster abilities.
EDIT III: My current Bankster is on floor 8. Keeping zorkmids up is no problem with Pyramid Scheme, IF, and HIL--I use IF on bosses and single target high-hp mobs, cleanse the debuffs with Bailout or DTA before they get to me, and can make about 75% of a HiL per mob. IF really didn't start to bring in zmids regularly until floor 4-5, I think the main issue I've been having is that my Bankster's have a hard time surviving that long; I may have to start thinking of Bankster as a late-game skill. What's really terrible is using Insurance Fraud and Fiscal Hedge together... I find that if I want to up my zmid count I need to spam HIL and use IF w/o FH active.

On the whole, I think my biggest critique is the insane amount of micromanagement Bankster requires as well as its hotbar real-estate. If i just want to use it as a way to make a lot of zorkmids, I don't want it taking up 2-3 spots on my hotbar to do so. I'd rather see some of it rolled in to passives so that I don't feel like I'm CONSTANTLY hammering the same skills. A set-it-and-forget-it HIL or Insurance Fraud would go a long way toward making the skill less of a headache in my book.

Edit IV: Woo, just beat Dredmor on GRPD, NTTG with Bankster in a build:
Bankster
Mathemagic
Egyptian Magic
Berserker Rage
Unarmed
Shield Bearer
Tourist

Ended up dual shielding Mirror Darkly Shields and hurling Clockwork Buzzsaws at him until he died (none of my other abilities could damage him ) , but my Bankster survived it. Fiscal Hedge is definitely a powerhouse when combined with the Diggle God of War buff and the insane gear I was able to find. Eventually solved the hotbar issue by removing IF and HIL from it once I had over 500k gold, and just farmed some zmids back up when/if I got low. In the end I was able to kill everything in the game (haven't Diggle-helled yet) in both melee or with a fully glyphed up Sandstorm, but had to resort to cheese tactics against Dredmor himself--not necessarily a problem with Bankster there (Dump Toxic Assets was actually hitting him for 6 damage! hehe).

 

I am still not very far with bankster, but I have to say that the ability to just mass produce gold on the first levels is insanely powerful.

Two points to consider:

• More valuable the higher the difficulty
• More valuable when you are not playing NTTG

At higher difficulties, you get far less gold and sometimes early, it would be nice to be able to get whatever you wanted out of the starting vending machines... more food, more bolts, more crafting recipes. Awesome.Money becomes relevant. Normally money doesn't do anything for you because you don't have any of it until you are pretty deep. I had about 2k on the first floor before the first brax overdue loan showed up. Even with that being on you, as long as you use it on cooldown, you will be making more gold than it is costing you, so you still dont' have to worry about even the second point in bankster to dump it. Finally, you can poke your head down onto the second floor whenever you pass the stairwell, and the cost in zorkmids jumps up by 1 per floor. but if you are going back up the stairs right afterward, that prints a lot of zorkmids. That translates into amazing items that can often trivialize the floor or even the next 5 floors. Which is one third the game right there. A couple of amazing weapons and armor and you can laugh your way through many a floor.
And when you aren't playing NTTG, you are guaranteed 3 shops per level. And sometimes you can get a level 10 plus item spawning in a first floor shop. As opposed to stealing items, you can keep the floor safe and explored. With each floor the possibilities open up. Granted, late game, any build can afford any item, and most of the good items can be found anyway, but as far as I can tell, bankster really should be a guaranteed opener for many a weaker build that can die easily in a GRPD build.

The damage on Dump toxic Assets is pretty decent early game I will have to decide late game, although since I am low on rogue skills I will be a bit below the curve on caddishness.

And that is my review of just the first two skills (High Interest Loan and Dump Toxic Assets).

 

In case my picture didn't give it away, I feel pretty good about Banksterism.

Yes, its hotbar consumption is annoying, its debuffs are irritating enough to make me want to DTA on the nearest foe but not QUITE enough to matter when I want to hit them, and the micromanagement is a chore. But still...

Damn, it feels good to be a Bankster.

Gold on demand, money turning into shielding, instantly bribing named monsters into doing your bidding? It's just so damned fun. If the skill were to change in one way, I'd change DTA so it dumped ALL my Toxic Assets onto the target, making it a fine anti-mage nuke. Crushing Dredmor under the weight of my own fiscal tomfoolery sounds awesome.

Outside of the skillset proper, I think a good change would be to make money matter more. Raise prices all around, increase the presence of crafting machines, and ensure a higher rate of badass items in Brax's shops with a price that makes a Communist's head spin. Also, make more synergistic abilities like Pyramid scheme, particularly with other Rouge-ish skills like Burglary or Perception, while making skills like Communism or Tourism more risky to combine with Pyramid Scheme.

Thoughts?

P.S. Hee hee. Dumping Toxic Assets sounds like pooping. Hee hee hee.

 

One big problem with Banksterism is that High Interest Loan, if spammed, gives you a net gain of zorkmids eventuall provided you manage the debuffs. This is very tedious. If it consistently lost you money, it'd be less of a thing with you click every N turns like the old fungal arts spore summoning.

Casting a spell every N turns is NOT fun.

 

If Brax wasn't so pitifully easy to steal from, maybe Banksterism's would be better.

 

Brax shops usually don't have Charm and Take Half Damage available for theft though

(but yeah, it does take several money-related skillpoints to reach those)

 

I can think of quite a few ways to make bankster much more enjoyable.


Insurance Fraud: Instead of a cash payout, let you spend Zorkmids to stack a debuff on the target, If the target dies, it drops an item, the more stacks, the better the possibility the item would be. (is this possible?)
Bailout: Let it be a small heal AND a full fledge decurse. Since you already can dump toxic assets and standard decurses are already better, let this capstone be awesome.

High interest Loan is the most problematic. My best idea for the fix. Make a Brittle Buff. When you attack or cast a spell, you get Zorkmids. Every space you move costs you zorkmids (per floor level). When cast, you also get a random banker debuff. Thus you keep the investment (making money for doing stuff) and lose money for moving around (the interest on the loan) but you aren't constantly maintaining it.

 

Well, sort of it.
It could be made so that the debuff in question triggers an item-spawning effect on a random chance, but goes to it through another spell the sole purpose of which would be to check if there isn't a trigger-stopping dummy buff on you. And whenever an item would be dropped, that would also put this dummy buff on you, maybe just for that turn or maybe for longer.

This way it would limit the total drops to 1 in a single turn, no matter how many critters with the debuff on them died in that one turn, but still I think it would be a nice way to go at it.

Ugh, this one is rather problematic. On one hand, I can see why would you propose it as right now this skill is pretty much a "you gotta save yourself from yourself" skill which only interacts with this very skill tree.
And on the other hand, a heal doesn't really fit the whole thing because, well, it doesn't fit the theme.

The perfect fit for this skill would be an existence of more zorkmid-based skill trees, because having more of those means it would be a skill capable of saving one from stuff from other skill trees, sort of like a certain skill from Emomancy can cure things from other sources (of course it still wouldn't be as versatile, but the point stands).

So yeah, a small healing effect, even if not necessarily something that matches the theme, is likely the best we can get for it right now.

Hmm, how about making it delayed then? Sort of like a bailout allows one to recover from all that stuff, but only after a certain period of time is off. It could be made that it counts all the zorkmid-based debuffs and heals you proportionately to how many of them there were on you after, let's say, 10 turns, and in the meantime protects you from getting any more financial debuffs.

No comment there, outside of that it doesn't appear to suit the name it has now, but I have no ideas what to do with it now.

 

I like Bailout as it is, if only because it reflects well what being a Bankster is all about. Taking other people's money, getting yourself into a huge mess, and having taxpayers clean up while you get out of it having made a mint with your salary and bonuses.

 

Bailout is fine thematically, but not from a gameplay perspective.

The easiest way to make the tree interact meaningfully with the rest of the game is for the debuffs to stop costing what the buffs generate. Right now the tree generates zorks with a chance to cost zorks. Make it a chance to cost health, or mana, or stats instead, so you always get a net positive as far as Zorks go. Then give it the ability to spend those zorks on more things you really want, like health or mana or stats or items.