Update 3.2 - Two New Maps & more!

New Features

• New Map: Salmon Ladder
  - Watch out for the mud! Bloons move faster on the muddy area of the map.
  - Try this awesome new map in ranked games in White Wasteland and higher, plus casual, event and clan games.
• New Map: Island Base
  - Battle the bloons on your home turf with the first clan wars exclusive map.
  - This map will only appear in clan war matches and has a higher chance of appearing than other maps.
  - Want to try it out without as much pressure? You can still play it in private matches even if you’re not in a clan.
• New Bling Season
  - Collect awesome new seasonal cosmetics like the Dino DDT and Ski-daddle sell animation.
  - Flaunt the law with Cyber Quincy’s Cyber Crimes Showcase.
  - Get sneaky with Agent Jericho’s Spy Bot Showcase.
• New First Time Player Experience
  - We’ve completely overhauled the first time play experience for new players as our stats showed that most new players were opting to skip the tutorial matches against T.D. in favour of diving right in to real games.
  - New players will be free to play how they want with less intrusive help messages that display only when needed.
  - There have been several UI improvements and clarifications to help players intuitively understand how to play. Check the General Changes section of the patch notes for more info.
  - Existing players who had not unlocked Gwendolin by completing the old tutorial can unlock her in the Heroes screen for free. The T.D. avatar and banner are no longer available but will return in a future update.

General Changes

• Casual battles have been removed from Red Bloon Camp and the Ranked Battle button has been renamed to just “Battle”. As Red Bloon Camp players cannot lose trophies, there is no need for a low risk game mode. Casual games become available in Yellow Stadium.
• Bling season quests that would be difficult or impossible to complete while in Red Bloon Camp, such as “Win 2 Casual Games”, will not roll until Yellow Stadium.
• Wording on the event banner changed to make it clearer to new players when event games unlock.
• A visual effect now plays over activated ability icons each time they become available to use.
• Changed colour scheme of tower upgrade menu to match the rest of the game. Upgrades you can’t afford will now appear as grey buttons with red text.
• There is a now a visual effect that plays over the bloon send buttons when pressed to make it clearer how they are affecting income.
• There is now a visual effect on each income tick showing the cash earned.
• Players no longer earn a medal at the end of a season if they did not play any ranked games during that season.

Balance Changes

• Dart Monkey
  - Base: $200 -> $150
  - x2x Very Quick Shots: $150 -> $100
  - 3xx Spike-o-pult: $400 -> $450
  - xx3 Crossbow: $475 -> $450
  - We’ve made a few small price cuts to Dart Monkey’s early upgrades so that the tower can obtain greater relevance in the meta as a dominant early game tower.
• Boomerang Monkey
  - xx5 MOAB Domination: special moab kylie deals 40 -> 50 damage to moab class
  - Boomerang Monkey lacks late game potential, with its tier 5s generally being regarded as on the weaker side. We’ve buffed up the MOAB Domination so that it can better deal with the beefy MOAB class bloons in the later rounds.
• Tack Shooter
  - 5xx Inferno Ring: ring damage 8 -> 11
  - Despite receiving a few major buffs in the past, Inferno Ring still doesn't see much action and so we’re giving it another damage increase, this time to its ring in order to improve its grouped popping power.
• Ice Monkey
  - x5x Absolute Zero: ability grants all Ice Monkeys 1.5x -> 2x speed for 10 seconds. This now also affects Fusty the Snowman.
  - Absolutely Zero’s buff to Ice Monkeys is one interesting and obscure feature that many people may not know about, especially since the buff was not particularly significant. We have made this buff much more noticeable and included Fusty the Snowman so that it’ll hopefully now receive some more attention.
• Glue Gunner
  - Base: $200 -> $100
  - 1xx Glue Soak: $200 -> $150
  - Glue Gunner lacks early game efficiency, rarely seeing much use in the early few rounds. Therefore, we have made a couple of small price cuts so that it can perform a little better at this stage of the game.
• Sniper Monkey
  - Base: $350 -> $250
  - 1xx Full Metal Jacket: $300 -> $250
  - x1x Night Vision Goggles: $300 -> $200
  - x2x Shrapnel Shot: $400 -> $300
  - x3x Bouncing Bullet: $3000 -> $3200
  - xx1 Fast Firing: $350 -> $250
  - xx2 Faster Firing: $350 -> $250
  - Sniper Monkey also lacks early game efficiency, being most used for its tier 3/4/5 upgrades way past the early game. Additionally, Sniper hasn’t been particularly prevalent in highest arenas recently, so we have made quite a few price cuts to the early upgrades to encourage Sniper to be used more and to potentially provide some more use cases for it in the early game.
• Monkey Buccaneer
  - x4x Monkey Pirates: ability cooldown 50s -> 30s
  - The x4x ability cooldown now matches the x5x ability cooldown. Monkey Pirates almost always gets sold after the ability is activated, so this felt like a harmless buff. However, the intention of this change is more so to deal with a bug that affects towers with differing tier 4 and 5 ability cooldown lengths, causing the tier 5 ability to have an initial cooldown if the tower was upgraded too quickly. This is still an issue for other tier 5s that we hope to fix in the future, but in the meantime, this balance change indirectly fixes the issue for Buccaneer by avoiding the bug.
• Monkey Ace
  - x4x Ground Zero: ability cooldown 45s -> 35s
  - The x4x ability cooldown now matches the x5x ability cooldown. This change has been made for the same reasoning as the change made to Monkey Buccaneer.
• Heli Pilot
  - xx4/5 Comanche Defense/Commander: mini helis’ missile attack rate 3s -> 2s
  - Comanche Defense and Comanche Commander are the least used tier 4 and 5 Heli Pilot upgrades respectively, plus Heli Pilot in general is not particularly known for being great at pure damage but plays a more supportive role with its abilities. Therefore, we felt like the Comanche upgrades were in need of a buff to be more on par with the top path.
• Dartling Gunner
  - 3xx Laser Cannon: dart spread degrees 9.2 -> 0
  - x4x Rocket Storm: xx2 increases ability missiles pierce by +2 -> +3
  - 5xx Ray of Doom: xx2 allows the beam to deal an extra 55 damage to the first 1 -> 3 bloons it hits
  - Dartling has always had a decent presence in the meta, however it’s also always had some subpar upgrades, such as Laser Cannon and Ray of Doom. Since the top path leads on to 4xx Plasma Accelerator which already has no spread in its aim, we have passed down this accuracy to 3xx Laser Cannon, so that it can be more precise in its long distance accuracy. The Ray of Doom change has been made to provide a general buff to the upgrade and also to even out the crosspaths for it. Previously, it barely benefitted from the bottom path crosspaths since the beam already has high pierce, whereas the middle path crosspaths were massively more enticing, providing faster attack speed and camo detection. This Ray of Doom change offers the interesting possibility of xx2 now being the stronger crosspath when dealing with certain scenarios, such as defending multiple BADs. Lastly, xx2 provides regular x3x rockets with +3 pierce so it makes sense for this to also be the case for the ability rockets, especially since this crosspath option is not as appealing as the top path.
• Wizard Monkey
  - 1xx: seeking/turning rate 360 -> 600
  - 3xx Arcane Mastery: $1400 -> $1200
  - x5x Wizard Lord Phoenix: ability main projectile damage 30 -> 40
  - Wizard’s top path has high pierce but often struggles to make use of it all due to its slow turning speed, so that has been increased quite a bit. Alongside this, it has received a minor price cut so that it can perform better as a starting tower. Wizard Lord Phoenix’s damage has always felt a little bit underwhelming when faced with BAD’s, so we’ve upped its damage.
• Ninja Monkey
  - xx2 Caltrops: caltrops drop every 4.4s -> 9s and damage 1 -> 3. (102 increases rate to every 5.6s and 502 increases it to every 2.8s)
  - xx2 Caltrops: 5xx now increases Caltrops damage to 30
  - x2x Distraction: 5xx now increases chance of distracting bloons from 25% -> 100%
  - x2x Distraction: 5xx’s projectiles now have a 15% chance of distracting MOABs (not BFBs and above) by a distance between 45-75
  - The basic Caltrops change has been made so that they can pack more of a punch, since previously they often got disregarded as being insignificant. Additionally, they were known for contributing towards lag, especially if you had lots of them, so hopefully the slower attack rate will offer a slight improvement in this area. For 5xx Grandmaster Ninja, we’ve made 2 interesting crosspath changes. The middle path was never used as the preferred crosspath due to the distraction not being very relevant, so it has been greatly improved for 5xx by now including MOABs. For the bottom crosspath, although already the preferred choice, we wanted to buff it up anyway so that 5xx would be stronger overall now, since previously it was often more efficient to buy multiple 4xx Bloonjitsu Ninjas instead of a 5xx. The 5xx upgrade provides more shuriken and higher damage on them, yet Caltrops did not benefit from either of these things, so it provided negligible damage relative to the shuriken. It has received a massive damage buff so that it can now scale up with the shuriken and play a greater role in Grandmaster Ninja’s overall firepower.
• Alchemist
  - xx2 Acid Pool: pools on the track can now hit camo bloons
  - 3xx Berserker Brew: x2x crosspath now increases the maximum number of buffed projectiles per potion from 25 to 30 (previously 40)
  - 4xx Stronger Stimulant: x2x crosspath now increases the maximum number of buffed projectiles per potion from 40 to 50 (previously 55)
  - xx5 Bloon Master Alchemist: rate 8.5 -> 7.5
  - Acid Pool gets very little attention, so we thought that it’d be an interesting and logical addition to allow the pools to hit camo bloons passing over them. On the other hand, Alchemist’s top path upgrades have always been appealing, usually serving as the primary incentive for Alchemist’s usage. We noticed that x2x is the preferred crosspath for 3xx/4xx Alchemists, being utilised 3 to 4 times more than xx1/xx2 in the highest arenas, so we decided to take the route of slightly weakening 3xx and 4xx by lowering the crosspath’s benefits. Lastly, Bloon Master Alchemist is far from a bad tower as it scales incredibly well with the late game MOAB ramping, however it is still the least used of Alchemist’s tier 5s. Its rate is incredibly slow which can make it unreliable for certain situations, so that has been buffed slightly.
• Druid
  - x3x Druid of the Jungle: $750 -> $450
  - x4x: $2800 -> $3100
  - x3x is pretty much always skipped over to get to x4x, rather than being an upgrade that can offer its own merit. Its price has been cut considerably whilst bumping up the x4x cost so that the total cost for a Jungle’s Bounty Druid remains unchanged.
• Banana Farm
  - 3xx Banana Plantation: $2600 -> $2750
  - x3x Bank: end of round income (pre-interest) $400 -> $550
  - x5x Monkey-Nomics: ability cooldown 60s -> 50s, initial cooldown 20s -> 25s
  - Banana Farm has become increasingly popular as of recently, with it arguably being too dominant in the meta. We would like to tone it down slightly by upping the price of 3xx, a particularly efficient farm for the early/mid game. In addition to this, we have improved the Bank so that it can fill up earlier, since this upgrade does not get used and the long fill time is one major reason for this.
• Spike Factory
  - xx3 Long Life Spikes: gains a 4x speed boost at the start of each round for 2.5 -> 6 seconds (carries over to xx4/5)
  - Spike Factory’s bottom path has potential but often is not the best option because it must be bought in advance to build up a decent pile. Since the bottom path is all about longer durations, we’ve increased the duration of the speed boost at the start of each round, allowing slightly beefier spike piles to be built up in the short term.
• Benjamin
  - Base: $1000 -> $900
• DJ Ben Jammin’
  - Base: $1000 -> $900
  - For being the only heroes that does not provide any bloon popping power early on, Benjamin and DJ Ben Jammin’ were pretty highly priced relative to the other heroes.
• Smudge Catt Ezili
  - Level 7: Scratching Post provides an additional x0.7 -> x0.5 rate buff to Smudge Catt
  - Level 7: Scratching Post gives Smudge Catt additional MOAB class damage equal to 5x -> 6x Smudge Catt’s level
  - Since Smudge Catt Ezili is currently a very under-utilised hero, we would like to give her Scratching Post ability a couple of buffs so that it can be more effective at dealing with rushes.
• Adora
  - Base cost: $850 -> $700
  - XP leveling curve: 1.5x Striker Jones’ XP -> 1.5x Quincy’s XP
  - Level 3: Long Arm of Light ability increases pierce by 2x -> 2.4x
  - While Adora has demonstrated effectiveness in the later stages of the game, her performance is lacking early on, especially initially before she upgrades to shoot out multiple sparks. To address this, we have lowered the base cost and changed the leveling curve, so that she can reach some of the key early levels a little sooner. Furthermore, Long Arm of Light has been improved to make it a more impactful ability, as it currently offers mediocre assistance.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed towers automatically being sold when placed near water that is being frozen by an Ice Monkey.
• Fixed issue where it was possible to continue playing an event after it had ended.
• Fixed the speed boost from Star Captain Jericho still applying if a camo bloon loses its camo property.
• Fixed Clan War battles taking place in the event arena rather than the arena they are named after.
• Fixed randomisation of event rewards to give a more even spread of hero points.
• Fixed Super Monkey’s darkshift ability creating visual anomalies in the centre of the screen.
• Fixed Sun Goddess Adora losing access to Blood Sacrifice ability after merging with the 500 Supermonkey and then crosspathing to 510.
• Fixed graphical issue where UI elements were overlapping and black squares were appearing in the corners of some devices.
• Fixed planes and avatars spawned by a 500 Super Monkey not gaining camo detection if the Super Monkey was then upgraded to 502.
• Fixed scrolling textures losing quality over time.
• Fixed Adora sometimes playing her reveal animation on loop after merging with the True Sun God.
• Fixed x4x and x5x Banana Farm abilities now working correctly if you are already in debt.
• Fixed missing silencer when using Agent Jericho’s Pre-Mission Prep Matchup animation with the Ray Gun Weapon Skin.
• Fixed missing SFX in Agent Jericho’s Fresh Clip taunt.
• Fixed long and uncomfortable silence after some matchup animations.
• Fixed splash screen displaying at the wrong size on some devices.

Update video: https://youtu.be/F1YmwCF-SOo

Let us know your feedback in the comments and happy gaming! :)