Sentry Champion

"Creates super-powerful but highly unstable sentries."

- In-game description

, formerly named Sentry Paragon until update 28.0, is the 5th upgrade of Path 1 for the Engineer Monkey in Bloons TD 6. It allows the Engineer to build purple sentries that shoot high-damage plasma and explode instead of despawning, destroying nearby bloons. Each active Champion Sentry shoots plasma at 15 times per second, deals 2 damage per shot, and each shot has 5 pierce (6 with 5-0-1 or 5-0-2). Once a Sentry Champion is deactivated, it undergoes a brief 2-second phase (or immediately if manually sold) before exploding at 50 blast radius with 100 damage and up to 50 pierce.

Although the purple sentries, called Champion Sentries, replace all of the Sentry Expert's four specialized sentries, Sentry Champion has the highest overall DPS out of all Engineer Monkeys (except the upcoming Engineer Monkey Paragon), excluding instakills from the XXXL Trap upgrade.

It costs $27,200 on Easy, $32,000 on Medium, $34,560 on Hard and $38,400 on Impoppable.

Champion Sentry
The Champion Sentry is purple and appears much larger than previous sentries, with a slightly more complex design. It shoots plasma at a very high speed and deals 2 damage per shot with a pierce of 5 per plasma blast. Plasma can pop Frozen Bloons and Lead Bloons, however it cannot pop Camo Bloons (unless camo detection is granted) or Purple Bloons, unless supported with another nearby tower buff such as Monkey Intelligence Bureau. Note that the sentries don't have to be in range of any buffs to receive it. Only the Engineer themselves has to be in range of tower buffs for the sentries to also be affected.

Unlike other sentries, it explodes upon despawning, destroying any Bloons in the explosion radius and heavily damaging MOAB-class Bloons, resembling the Tech Terror's ability. The explosion radius is very slightly larger than the sentry's own range, but it cannot pop Purples unlike Tech Terror's ability.

Champion Sentries disable themselves after 25 seconds (30 with MK). Alternatively, a Champion Sentry can be sold to produce an on-demand explosion. Upon automatic disabling, a Champion Sentry requires a 2-second cooldown before it finally explodes. Manually exploded Champion Sentries bypass the timed explosion cooldown.

Plasma:
 * Damage Type: Plasma
 * Pierce: 5 (6 with 5-0-1)
 * Damage: 2
 * Attack Speed: ~15 attacks/second
 * Range: 50

Explosion:
 * Damage Type: Plasma
 * Pierce: 50
 * Damage: 100
 * Range: 50

Summary
Sentry Champion is a solid DPS option, although alternative options exist that fulfill a similar purpose. The main strength of Sentry Champion comes from its Champion Sentry plasma attacks, which deal a respectable amount of overall damage to both MOAB-class and bloons. Expired sentries additionally explode after a short delay for an unreliable but useful cleanup. Adding attack speed buffs such as Jungle Drums or Overclock to the Sentry Champion Engineer is strongly recommended to maximize the Engineer's damage potential. However, Sentry Champion does have extreme synergy with Call To Arms and Homeland Defense, boosting its potential DPS by a huge amount.

Tips

 * If the Sentry Champion Engineer has any attack speed boosts active, it can produce more Sentries at a time and increasing its damage output.
 * Try adding Overclock to the Sentry Champion, as this allows the Sentry Champion to consistently produce sentries at a significantly improved rate. Although it doesn't improve the sentries themselves, the deployment rate of Champion Sentries increases with attack speed buffs.
 * Jungle Drums can improve both the Champion Sentry deployment rate and the Champion Sentries themselves, provided the main Engineer has this buff.
 * Adding Call To Arms or Homeland Defense greatly improves its damage potential by improving both Champion Sentry deployment rate and Champion Sentry attack speed. On top of this is gaining extra pierce for all its attacks.
 * When crosspathing upgrades to enhance the Sentry Champion's sentries, it's best to choose the 5-2-0 crosspath over the 5-0-2 crosspath. With Deconstruction, Champion Sentries deal +1 damage versus MOAB-class and +1 versus Fortified, and since the main issues during late-game are generally MOAB-class and Fortified, this crosspath is almost always better than just granting +1 pierce via 5-0-2. Pin cannot affect Ceramics, and since Super Ceramics form the majority of late-game, the Pin effect simply isn't worth it for how deep in the game it goes.
 * Dark Castle is an especially good map for the Sentry Champion. Placing him between two paths gives his exploding sentries a chance to hit densely-packed Bloons on both sides.

Sounds
When a sentry is placed:
 * [gadget placement]
 * [gadget placement]

When a Champion Sentry explodes:
 * [exploding electric fuse]

Trivia

 * The sentry's design is similar to Engineer's Workshop 4th tier Sentry from BTD5.
 * The Champion Sentry is the only tower that can be "sold" on CHIMPS mode, except between Version 21.0 and Version 22.0 when the sell option for Champion Sentries were disabled. When sold, it automatically activates an on-demand explosion.
 * According to Ninja Kiwi's 16th July 2021 blog, Ninja Kiwi replied "probably not!" to a question about Sentry Paragon's name change. However, in a different blog, October 15th 2021 blog, Sentry Champion had its name changed to avoid confusion with actual Paragons.