So we have threads about most of the other new skills, but none about Bankster. (Aside from one about exploiting it but...) Bankster is incredibly fun and very strategical. Lining up your debuffs with dumping your toxic assets is a really refreshing way to play from just "Is it charged? Spam." Though the use of money is a little questionable late-game as I'm sure we've all felt the disappointment of having 300k Zorkmids and nothing to buy, it's very effective early game and it's own skills compliment the inevitable stockpile of Zorkmids you should horde up. What do you think? Any good builds? Edit: Haha that's be not paying attention. Meant to name it "World Bankster Discussion Center" because, you know... Yeah... Joke ruined.
I haven't finished playing with it, but I was thinking the same things. Since the skilltree comes with a charm spell I guess that helps give it lasting usability. I think, though, that it would have been cool if it had 1 more ability that was on a cool down, and when used, would generate a random vending interface that is littered with random items from all walks of Dredmor economic life, but with slightly higher prices than is normal. Since bankster is entirely about making lots of money, but ultimately resources are all limited in the game and thus zorkmids, as a replenishable resource no matter what (although tediously so), I think it would be neat if it had a way of unreliably but assuredly allowing you to get your hands on more resources. not that resources are ever a problem for me. I've never gotten into a situation where I simply didn't have enough food or alcohol, and if I've got craftin' then usually I run into what I need... even if it takes 2-4 floors to find it.
I've always avoided it after trying it once because I thought it was bugged. I cast insurance fraud on a stack of corpses and got about 60,000 zorkmids instantly. By the end of level 1 I had about 300,000z. At the moment that skill is just "Get anything from any shop you want for free".
It definately needs some balancing. The whole IF thing on corpse stacks trivializes the cost of nearly everything....even before I discovered that, and with Bailout bugged and not working...I was building up cash slowly/steadily, but I was careful about not letting debuffs get out of control. Fiscal Hedge is amazing and what makes the tree in my opinion. Burst/heavy hits is what kills well built characters, and FH protects against this so well. The charm spell seems wonky, the charmed enemies rarely seem to aggro/attack anything for me although charming them lets me kill them myself without fear. It's going to be hellish to balance Bankster. It's a fine line between it being infinite gold over time vs. something that's a gold sink to the point of being unviable.
All the bankster bugs and exploits are getting patched out in the next patch iteration. In any case, the only way you'll get large sums of money out of Bankster anyway is using high interest loan coupled with dump toxic assets in case something goes south. If you also proc Frozen account it sometimes dumps a ton of money into your cash reserve at the cost of a debuff and siphoning out cash as part of 'running expenses off a line of credit.'
Just started playing with this skill tree and I've only gotten as far as Dump Toxic Assets and have found that Dump Toxic Assets frequently procs worse effects than what I'm getting rid of. Is that supposed to happen?
Hire Contractor is great for Pacifying a monster long enough for you to kill it at your own leisure. If you have some extra money, you could spam it inside a zoo and close the door. but mostly it's to pacify monsters until you kill them. Fiscal hedge is great, yeah. Last time I tried it you could even stack the effect. but that meant tons of debuffs to deal with.
