Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-39394247-20200514045453

Round 200 is a major obstacle in freeplay, with blimps that move at red bloon speed and have 1.3 million health, and which cannot be stalled in any way. Even a VTSG cannot beat round 200 on some maps.

Is it best to have a VTSG purely for damage or for support of many 4th tier temples? Since the 4th tier buffs stack, temples can make each other incredibly OP:

7.43x attack speed from 11 temples, or 55.75x (?!) with all possible buffs (Permabrew, Ultraboost, Homeland Defense, Jungle Drums) - thus, up to 1208 shots per second from the main beam.

+22 damage, or +23 with Permabrew - that's 48 total damage per shot, so up to 58,000 damage per second on a single target from the main beam alone! That is even enough to take out round 200 if only one temple was attacking.

+75 pierce - mostly insignificant.

With a VTSG, where base damage is 225 (?), that puts the total damage at 300,000 DPS max for a single target from the main beam. Missiles at 900 (?) damage each for another 100,000, the 40-50 mini avatars for about 2,000,000, and the spectres for 117,000. This puts the potential single-target damage at 2.5 million per second. Combining this with 20 or so 4th tier temples, that should enable enough damage to be dealt to reach the speed cap at round 830 for long maps, where fortified BADs have ~12 million HP and move at 5.6x normal red bloon speed. After round 830, speed ramping stops but health ramping accelerates, meaning that the overall difficulty increase does not change. 