Apache Dartship is the Heli Pilot's path 1 tier 4 upgrade in Bloons TD 6. It grants Heli Pilot two new attacks, a machine gun and a missile launcher, and enhances its existing attacks. Additionally its flight speed increases by 25%.
The machine gun fires darts which deal 1 damage, have 7 pierce, and have an attack cooldown of 0.05 seconds. These darts cannot damage Lead or Frozen Bloons. The missile launcher fires 4 homing rockets per shot which deal 2 damage, have 40 pierce, and have an attack cooldown of 1 second. These rockets cannot damage Black Bloons. The missile launcher has a range of 84 units, twice that of Heli Pilot's other attacks.
This upgrade reduces the attack cooldown of Heli Pilot's quad darts by 25%, for an attack speed increase of ~33.33%. This upgrade enhances the razor rotors, increasing their damage from 2 to 4 and their pierce from 10 to 20.
Apache Dartship is an expensive but only decent T4 that takes down most mid-game rounds with ease on maps with one active entrance per round, due to its slow flight speed. Apache Dartship mostly stands out in Contested Territory Least Tiers, where it can be a set-and-forget after upgrading from a buffed Razor Rotors. In CHIMPS, it only serves as a saveup to Apache Prime, which still has the map weaknesses, but it pairs well with Rosalia as she greatly discounts it and the T5.
4-0-2 is preferred for optimal DPS as opposed to 4-2-0, whose flight speed boost is insufficient for multi-lane maps and Camo detection that is better bought elsewhere (outside of Least Tiers in Contested Territory, Odysseys, etc).
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Heli Pilot manages on pursuit far too easily without any need to consider Bigger Jets unless camo or downdraft is required. For more crosspath variety than just ‘camo’ we moved more of the base Heli speed out and back into Bigger Jets with an overall buff to Bigger Jets. This should allow Bigger Jets to scale a little better than other helis through early speed ramping. — Update notes
Apache Dartship has also fallen off over time as a viable saveup for prime, though it is meant to be reasonably difficult some changes have made this a little more difficult than it probably should be so we have increased the pierce of the machinegun attack. — Update notes
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Previously Razor Rotor’s used to make the heli pursue for a further distance & this caused it to often fail to reach Lead Bloons with the rotor attack that could pop them. This overall seemed like a design flaw so that back-off distance has been moved up to the T4 instead. Apache Dartship has also fallen off over time as a viable saveup for prime, though it is meant to be reasonably difficult some changes have made this a little more difficult than it probably should be so we have increased the pierce of the machinegun attack. — Update notes
Heli’s Razor Rotors don’t scale with higher tiers so improvements have been made specifically to that attack for Dartship & Apache Prime. — Update notes
Pursuit will now interact with Patrol Points in a limited ‘pursuit between points’, with this now you will be able to make your pursuit heli stay on one side on multi-path maps without getting stuck in the middle. Razor Rotors is fairly good now, but it could still justify a little more power given the weaknesses of the expensive upgrades that it builds into. — Update notes
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Pursuit upgrades the Patrol Points flight pattern to a ‘Pursue Between Points’
Among technical players we’ve received feedback that the massive range of the Heli’s missiles causes problems with controlling what heli’s choose to attack & when so we’ve reduced the range of these missiles to a more reasonable number, this is still double the range of the Heli so the missiles will continue to fire first before other attacks but not quite from so far away. — Update notes
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Missile: targeting range reduced ― 173 → 84
Note: Reducing targeting range of missile will reduce opportunities to waste projectile lifespan on chasing Bloons.
We’re raising move speed for Apache Dartship up to match Prime to improve skillful use in some more difficult situations mainly assisting on spread path maps — Update notes
Upgrade cost reduced ― $20,000 → $15,000
Upgrade cost increased ― $19,500 → $19,600
Lock in Place and Patrol Points no longer immediately prompt to choose target positions and instead have default positions
Apache Dartship with no crosspath
Apache Dartship with 410 crosspath
Apache Dartship with 420 crosspath
Apache Dartship with 401 crosspath
Apache Dartship with 402 crosspath
Apache Dartship helipad
Apache Dartship using its attacks
Portrait
Upgrade icon
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