Pirate Lord

"Greatly increased attack speed for all attacks and can shoot 3 grappling hooks at once, plundering extra cash from each MOAB-class Bloon taken down."

- In-game description

Pirate Lord is the final upgrade of Path 2 for the Monkey Buccaneer in Bloons TD 6. It grants an improved MOAB Takedown Ability that allows the Buccaneer to pull down up to 3 MOAB-Class Bloons, including ZOMGs (although 2 hooks are required), but not BADs or bosses. The player receives +100% cash for each blimp pulled in.

The Pirate Lord's ability has no initial cooldown, allowing it to be used immediately upon upgrading (provided that its previous upgrade's ability is not on cooldown after use). Cooldown for this ability upon activation is reduced from 50 seconds to 30 seconds.

Besides an improved ability, all base attacks (darts, grapes and bombs) attack twice as fast, and grapes deal 5 damage, +5 versus Ceramics.

This upgrade costs $17,850 on Easy, $21,000 on Medium, $22,680 on Hard, and $25,200 on Impoppable.

Description
TBA

Pirate Lord Ability
Pirate Lord Ability is the Special Ability for the Pirate Lord upgrade and is an upgraded version of MOAB Takedown. The ship takes hold of up to three of the strongest MOAB-Class Bloon on the screen with harpoons and destroys them completely. Most blimps require one hook to pull in, but ZOMGs require two hooks. BADs and bosses are fully immune to this ability. DDTs are always prioritized over ZOMGs.

The player is rewarded +100% income. Adding Monkey Town adds +50% (+60% with "Inland Revenue Streams" MK) more income, and Monkey City increases it by an extra +15%. A blimp affected by Rubber to Gold adds another +200% income.

This table shows the income earned for different blimps, considering only the Pirate Lord's +100% cash bonus was applied.

Summary
Pirate Lord's lack of an initial cooldown allows its ability to be repeatedly sold and bought back to instantly take down many ZOMGs and groups of weaker blimps. But as a lone tower, it is quite weak at both general damage and insta-kills, as its hook ability has a moderate ability cooldown. The upside is that any blimps taken down with the Pirate Lord ability gain +100% income, although the Pirate Lord's attacks can sometimes become too powerful, destroying blimps before they can be taken down with its ability.

Tips

 * DDTs can be pulled even if the tower can not detect camos.
 * Pirate Lord gives surprising amounts of money from the hooks, but generally this is still an unreliable source of income.
 * Alchemist's Rubber to Gold upgrade will increase the cash earned by an affected blimp by +200% (with the +100% natural bonus, blimps will give +300% income)
 * Place the Pirate Lord in range of a Bloontonium Reactor to decrease its ability cooldown by 15%. (50% with Energizer)
 * While Crow's Nest gives the main attacks the ability to pop all bloons, Faster Shooting and Double Shot are still useful to increase the overall power of the Pirate Lord. In practice though, the Pirate Lord will probably be used for his ability, and not firepower so this rarely matters.
 * If primarily used for its main attacks, it's better off going for 2-5-0 Pirate Lord rather than 0-5-2 Pirate Lord, because it will shoot twice as many highly damaging hot grapes per shot and it can shoot its highly damaging three-bomb sprays much faster. With the Version 22.0 buffs, crosspathing is more significant for giving Pirate Lord with DPS outside of instakills. But, if optimizing instakills, 0-5-0 is better, so as not to kill the blimps too quickly before the ability can become ready again.

Extra Notes (Version History)

 * Starting from around Version 23.1 or so, the Pirate Lord ability now always prioritizes DDTs over ZOMGs first. The game had "fixed some issues with Buccaneer MOAB Takedown hooks" according to the Version 23.1 patch notes; this likely was an indicator for the modified hook algorithms.
 * Version 25.0 changed the target priority of fortified over non-fortified; this likely affected Pirate Lord too.
 * It is not quite known how the Pirate Lord algorithm has changed exactly in history, but the Pirate Lord tested in Version 26.0 appears to now always target the first of the same rank. Priority tree currently operates as follows: blimp type (DDT, ZOMG, BFB, MOAB), fortification (yes or no), and order of appearance (always first).

Sounds
When activating Pirate Lord Ability:
 * [Hook launching]

Trivia

 * There used to be a bug where the Pirate Lord always pulled down 2 M.O.A.B. Class Bloons. This was fixed on Version 1.7.
 * The increased attack speed seems random, but it might be a reference to Battleship from BTD4 while giving more incentive to upgrade the tower besides a better ability.
 * After Version 8.0, when all farming-only abilities (including Tier 5 upgrades in this case) are required to undergo a full initial cooldown duration, the Pirate Lord ability is one of four abilities that, when bought, has the cooldown up immediately. The others are Total Transformation, MOAB Eliminator, and Absolute Zero.
 * In Version 17.0, the three-bomb buff now matches the actual tower graphics and the official artwork of the Monkey Pirates, which always had three rows of cannons per side.
 * Even though Version 19.0 added a separate money counter for almost all towers, it has not been yet implemented for Lead to Gold, Rubber to Gold, Monkey Town (and by extent Monkey City), Pirate Lord, Support Chinook (and by extent Special Poperations), and Jungle's Bounty. It has yet to be fully implemented for Spirit of the Forest (ability only), and Sun Temple and True Sun God / Vengeful True Sun God with Support sacrifices.
 * According to Ninja Kiwi's 21st January 2021 blog, Pirate Lord's ship is called the Simians Vengeance.