Faster Darts (Heli Pilot)

"Darts are propelled much faster through the air."

- In-game description

Faster Darts is the first upgrade of Path 3 (second upgrade of Path 3 prior to Version 18.0) for the Heli Pilot in Bloons TD 6. It allows the Heli Pilot's darts to travel faster. This does not affect the projectile speed of its other projectile-based attacks.

It costs $210 on Easy, $250 on Medium, $270 on Hard, and $300 on Impoppable.

Summary
There is little point of purchasing this upgrade alone, as the increased projectile speed usually does nearly no help in improving the overall performance of the Heli Pilot. However, the Faster Darts upgrade can be used to lock in the Path 3 crosspath to purchase Faster Firing and its further upgrades.

Tips

 * As of Version 18.0, Faster Darts is required for Faster Firing, which increases attack speed of all attacks by 25%.
 * Faster Darts is somewhat useful for allowing more accurate shots when chasing bloons, but is usually not very useful on most other occasions.
 * On a very few select challenges, starting from Version 13.0 with the release of Bloody Puddles, Faster Darts is a suitable solution for sniping out targets from far away.

Trivia

 * It is one of the only upgrades in BTD6 that only increases projectile speed.
 * Faster Rangs used to feature only increased projectile speed, but this was changed in Version 7.0 to also increase attack speed.
 * Faster Darts is a common meme among the BTD6 community, mostly because of how underpowered it is, although joking about Faster Darts went out of fashion Version 19.0, one month after swapping Faster Darts and Faster Firing.
 * Faster Firing and Faster Darts are the first pair of tower upgrades in the main Bloons TD series to have swapped places (Faster Firing used to come first).
 * Bloons Adventure Time TD was technically the first, but it isn't part of the main Bloons TD series. Interestingly, this was for Marceline, who attacks most similarly to the Heli Pilot.
 * The Alchemist also had Faster Throwing and Acid Pool swapped (Acid Pool used to come first) as of Version 21.0.