Powerful Darts (BTD6)

"Darts move faster and can pop 3 bloons each."

- In-game description

Powerful Darts is the second upgrade of Path 3 for the Dartling Gunner in Bloons TD 6. It increases projectile speed of the Dartling Gunner's projectiles by ~+50%, increases pierce from 1 to 3, and gives all attacks with frozen-popping. Pierce for most Tier 3 crosspaths and above is roughly +50% more pierce overall.

It costs $1,020 on Easy, $1,200 on Medium, $1,295 on Hard, and $1,440 on Impoppable.

Appearance
Powerful Darts changes the muzzle of the minigun into a singular barrel with three (or four with Advanced Targeting) holes, as well as recoloring the tripod to blue instead of black. In addition, the Dartling Gunner gains one yellow stripe (or green stripe with Faster Barrel Spin and later upgrades) each on opposite sides of his helmet. Darts are colored blue and all projectiles produce trails as they glide through the air.

Summary
Powerful Darts allows the Dartling Gunner's darts to reach its located target sooner by increasing its projectile speed. Additionally, the benefit of additional pierce makes the Dartling Gunner much stronger against the middle early-game. The combination of these two benefits for the Dartling Gunner make this tower become highly effective as a solo early-game option.

Tips

 * Powerful Darts is an effective early-game solo option, as it helps tackle the lower Dartling Gunner's main weaknesses against early-game grouped bloons.
 * Compared with other early-game solo towers at similar price points, especially 2-0-2 Airburst Darts or 3-0-1 Double Shot Ninja, a 1-0-2 Powerful Darts has much longer range, is excellent along straight lines, but it has no camo potential.
 * Combining Powerful Darts with Focusing Firing will further improve accuracy by a slight amount, as the darts will reach to their destined locations sooner.
 * There is a special crosspath benefit with Powerful Darts and Hydra Rocket Pods by adding +1 explosion and +2 pierce for the explosions. Likewise, there is a special crosspath for Plasma Accelerator and Ray of Doom that adds +25 pierce instead of +2 pierce, though for the latter it's very insignificant.

Trivia

 * Powerful Darts costs twice as much in BTD6 compared to in previous generation games.
 * This upgrade and Ray of Doom are the only returning Dartling Gunner upgrades to change tier between BTD5 and BTD6.
 * Powerful Darts is the second upgrade in BTD6 to cost $1200 on Medium for the upgrade cost alone, the first being Really Big Bombs since Version 7.0.
 * The buff in Version 29.0 that gives frozen-popping is likely inspired by the existing BTDB2 counterpart of this upgrade, which also gives frozen-popping.

Errors

 * On the Version 29.2 patch notes detailing about the bug fix of Powerful Darts unexpectably preventing lead-popping for Plasma Accelerator and Ray of Doom, the upgrade name for Powerful Darts is incorrectly written with an "F" instead of a "D", resulting in a misspelling that jokingly implies the act of producing odorous flatulence. This misspelling is likely a typo, though it has never been corrected.