We wanted to focus heads down on getting the Frontier’s Campaign out before the end of the year, and due to how large of a project this ended up being we did not have the time in this update to go over our usual balance process and had to make do with the light list of changes that had already been looked at. We can’t make any promises on this as there is not much longer until we wrap up for the year and we expect it will be very busy already, but we will try to consider more light lift (numerical-only) balance along with minor v52 patches as time permits. — Update notes
”
General changes
Fire and Plasma are no longer considered the same damage type
Note: Functionally they are still the same (cannot damage Purple or Glass Bloons) with the exception that Fire deals +1 damage to Dynamite Bloons in Frontier Legends. Energy damage type also cannot damage Glass Bloons but it is otherwise unchanged.
Affected towers attacks include:
This section is incomplete. You can help out by expanding it. The editor who added this notice elaborates: Missing Corvus and Rosalia attacks
Dart Monkey’s paragon is currently far too cost effective for being the cheapest paragon so we are lowering its power, but this is mainly directly against bosses so its base damage will also increase to compensate against non-boss targets. We also want to note that the Juggernaut is currently unintentionally rebounding even off map borders, we have not fixed this for this update though will still be monitoring it for now. — Update notes
Top and Middle Desperado favour lower tiers too much so we’re doing a light shift on these to more favour upgrades without improving them too much. Bottom path desperado on the other hand suffers on trickier maps due to its low range design so we are bumping up the knockback at all tiers and reducing Avenger’s cost. — Update notes
MOAB Shove heli’s still stall ZOMGs incredibly efficiently for such a cheap tower, so we are furthering the previous nerf to ZOMG slow amount, still leaving Comanche Defense unchanged — Update notes
MOAB Shove: Speed multiplier for ZOMGs and DDTs increased ― 0.61× → 0.75×
Note: X-X-4 Comanche Defense unchanged (0× and 0.2× respectively). The previous value listed for the ZOMG multiplier in the patch notes has the Bigger Jets upgrades applied.
Half the bonuses for Temples were being unlocked for 1/5th the price, which ended up making it very awkward to balance a meaningful progression between these unlocks, as well as being difficult for players to remember when a new bonus unlocked. We are now spacing these thresholds out across more consistent intervals which for the most part spaces out major bonus unlocks on every 10k interval, and minor upgrades on the 5k spaces between. Lastly, we’re increasing the minimum range requirement on the Military missile further as we want it to still be very powerful, but limited enough by this factor that you wouldn’t want it on too many temples — Update notes
Last update many players felt blindsided when Brickell stopped applying her buff to Mermonkeys since there was no mention in the balance changes section. We would like to apologize for that - it was tasked internally as a bug as it was indeed unintended to work that way. We then left the issue alone for a long time, mostly due to other more pressing matters, and this issue fell through the cracks. In retrospect, it would have been better to treat this as balance rather than a simple bug fix due to how much time had passed. Reading through your feedback, we did consider just reverting the change, however the bigger issue that the feedback reinforced to us was that players considered Mermonkey to be so bad that it was only a "good" tower when used in combination with a single, water-only hero.
This sort of forced synergy goes against our design intentions - namely that Mermonkey being our signature amphibious tower should be able to stand on its own without being balance-locked to an interaction with a single hero. With all that in mind, we feel Mermonkey's highest priority right now is large sweeping buffs to each of the paths, so most of the following changes are our first step towards this starting from the low tier crosspaths. — Update notes
Note: Attack cooldown reduction from 0-0-0 increased from 15% to 20%. The patch notes do not specify that the attack speed buff is only for the main trident attack, all other attacks unchanged.
Note: Attack cooldown reduction from 1-x-x increased from 18% to 25%. The patch notes do not specify that the attack speed buff is only for the main trident attack, all other attacks unchanged.
It seems we really overtuned Spike Paragon with its last changes, and it has dominated most boss events ever since, so it is being reeled back in again. — Update notes
Engi Paragon is too good across the board since the addition of its Overclock ability, we’re moving the Village Range buff in line with the normal overclock, and nerfing its ability cooldown so that higher degrees are required to keep a high uptime buffing other paragons. Since the AoE overclock is unique to the Engineer Paragon and not aimed at other Paragons that part of the ability is instead being improved on. — Update notes
”
Tiers
Changes
Paragon
Power Glove ability: Bonus range given to Monkey Villages decreased ― +25% → +15%
Power Glove ability: Cooldown increased ― 45s → 90s
Power Glove ability: Overclock area of effect radius increased ― 24 units → 30 units
Power Glove ability: Overclock area of effect duration increased ― 15s → 30s
Pierce scaling with Beast Power reduced ― +21 → +18
Note: With both changes combined the pierce at maximum Beast Power is reduced from 35 to 30. 0-4-0 Tyrannosaurus Rex unchanged (22 and +33, respectively)
Striker Jones’ Concussive Shell has been working as too much of a heavy carry for how quickly it recharges, it will now have a little less pierce & the reduced MOAB duration now applies from Lv3 instead of Lv9, and will have even less duration against higher tier MOAB-Classes. — Update notes
”
Levels
Changes
3−8
Concussive Shell: Pierce reduced ― 48 → 36
9+
Concussive Shell: Pierce reduced ― 58 → 48
3−8
Concussive Shell: Stun duration for MOABs and DDTs reduced ― 1s → 0.6s
As Obyn’s value has climbed significantly, we no longer feel his Wall of Trees needs to continue being as strong as it is to prop him up, and so its pierce is being reduced. — Update notes
Psi should be quite strong given their position in the game, but is performing a little too well so we are slightly reducing their Lv3 ability cooldown rate. — Update notes
This update resolved an issue where Silas’ Rime slow was only applying a reduced slow value to standard MOABs, meaning that all other MOAB-Class Bloons (outside of Bosses and BADs) were being completely slowed by the same amount as standard Bloons. Silas has been incredibly powerful so this fix felt entirely fair as a nerf, however we wanted to clarify this here as we mentioned there was little free time this update to review the impact of said fix in great depth so we may consider reducing the total MOAB penalty at a later date after this has time to settle — Update notes
”
Levels
Changes
1+
6+
Vision of Ice: Cannot longer attack in the range of towers other than Ice Monkeys (bug fix)
Experience Frontier Legends! A story-driven Bloons TD 6 experience set on the Monkey Frontier
Freeze the Bloons with the Ice Monkey Paragon!
Run down the Bloons on the new Expert map, Tricky Tracks!
Plus new Quests, balance changes, quality of life improvements, Trophy Store Cosmetics and more!
Notes
Ninja Kiwi made a quote for Admiral Brickell regarding their rationale to not revert the version 51.0 nerf to her water-specific interactions with amphibious towers (e.g. Ice Monkey and Mermonkey):
“
We won’t repeat the Mermonkey explanation from above, so go back and read that if you haven’t. However for clarity Brickell has always been a ‘Military’ hero to us, there have only been 2 water-based towers in the Bloons series which are both military towers so it hadn’t felt necessary to explain this in further detail given her clear military title, but in hindsight this wasn’t as clear as it was to us. Brickell is in an awkward position where we see she is clearly problematic for us but we are always met with resistance when trying to do anything about this, but when we can get past this we would be more open to looking at her applying broader across military or other militarized options, though with such buffs as powerful as her Naval Tactics in particular they do need to stay limited in some regard
”
The official update notes includes a joke change for Perma-Spike:
Buffs. Aura. Nerfs. Meta. Long ago, the four aspects lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Ninja Kiwi Nerfs attacked. Only the Balancer, master of all four aspects, could stop them, but when Permaspike needed him most, he vanished. Two months passed and Scout and I discovered the new Balancer, a Buffer named Bubble O' Bill. And although his Buffing skills are great, he has a lot to learn before he's ready to save anyone. But I believe Bubble O' Bill can save Permaspike.
xx5 Permaspike unchanged by 100%
Text emotes with white speech bubbles in the Trophy Store
Update requirements for Google Play version increased from 5.0 (Lollipop) to 8.0 (Oreo).
Silas' bugged slowdown was caused by the 5% slow effect only applying to Bloons with the tag Moab (used by standard MOABs specifically) instead of Moabs (used by all MOAB-Class Bloons).
In the player profile, the Insta Number Collection stat shows 1664 possible Insta Monkeys, which is 64 more instas than actually available in the game. (undocumented)
In the Trophy Store, Text Emotes are displayed with a white speech bubble, with the exception of "Happy Holidays" having the usual diamond speech bubble. (undocumented)
Frontier Legends Preview
Fire and Plasma are no longer considered the same damage type 
Towers now remain stunned after reloading a game (bug fix)
Low Knowledge curse: Now correctly disables the Monkey Knowledge upgrades from the XP Shop (bug fix)
Pre-release image
Release image
