Ice Shards (BTD6)

"Razor sharp shards fly out when Frozen Bloons pop."

- In-game Description

Ice Shards is the 3rd upgrade on Path 1 for the Ice Monkey. It causes bloons frozen by this tower to release 3 shards when popped. This includes Camo Bloons, as its previous upgrade Cold Snap gives camo detection to the Ice Monkey. More technically speaking, bloons affected by this Ice Monkey's blasts will set a shardable status effect for an amount of time equivalent to the duration of the freeze status effect of that tower.

Compared to BTD5, Ice Shards can only be sent out if the Frozen Bloons are popped by another tower other than itself, since its ice blasts are incapable of damaging Frozen Bloons on its own without Re-Freeze and attacks at a slower rate than the freeze duration. Along with that is Ice Monkey's general nerf of decreased pierce, both to the ice blast attack (down from infinite pierce to 40 pierce) and the shattering ice shards (3 pierce per shard, and only clusters of three at 120° apart). Ice Shards also grants extra range, from 20 to 25.

The ice shards from Ice Shards can damage MOAB-class bloons, whites and zebras, and frozen bloons. However they cannot damage lead bloons, or DDTs outside of being nearby a Monkey Intelligence Bureau.

Compared to BTD5, Ice Shards is cheaper, at $1275 on Easy, $1500 on Medium, $1620 on Hard, and $1800 on Impoppable.

Summary
Ice Shards is mostly relegated to races, but can still be decent on hyperdense rounds during mid-game rounds. Comboing Ice Shards plus Bloontonium Reactor makes a great combo to maximize shard production, as Reactor has a fast but reliable area-of-effect attack when submerged.

In BTD6, strategies that worked in BTD5 are no longer possible. However, 3-0-2 Ice Shards can be stacked together and form a similar mass-shredding of bloons.

Tips

 * If opting for a few separate Ice Shards to handle grouped waves, the 3-1-0 crosspath is generally preferred for Ice Shards, as it will allow sharding opportunities to occur more often. Deep Freeze is usually not necessary, as the release of shards will always occur as long as the bloon frozen by this tower was damaged by any means. 3-2-0 may be useful for producing more shards from passing shard potential to earlier bloons, but this has yet to be tested.
 * Groups of 3-0-2 Ice Shards are useful for popping up grouped waves in a somewhat similar way to in BTD5.
 * Because neither crosspath will naturally allow itself to trigger the shards, an additional tower should be added to pop the Frozen Bloons. Usually, this will involve adding nearby Bomb Shooters, but Bloontonium Reactor is far more reliable due to its decent range and fast attack rate.
 * Even when given MIB, an Ice Shards without 3-0-2 cannot activate its own shards. To produce auto-sharding with just a single Ice Monkey, upgrade an existing Ice Shards further to Embrittlement.
 * Ice Shards can indirectly affect blimps with its ice shards. This can only work when there are many other bloons on screen to let those shards active from freezing the affected bloons. This is mostly useful on Race Events that enable Ice Shards.

Trivia

 * Technically speaking, an Ice Shards in fact is able to produce shards on its own if crosspathed with Path 3's Re-Freeze upgrade and is buffed by a fast enough attack speed buff such as Overclock. However, crosspathing with only either Path 2 crosspaths or the Re-Freeze upgrade will not, as it cannot attack fast enough or pop Frozen Bloons. Link.
 * Though White and Zebra Bloons aren't frozen by the initial attack, they are still affected by Ice Shards' effect, releasing shards of ice when popped as if it were a frozen Bloon.
 * Like its BTD5 counterpart, Ice Shards is the only Tier 3 Ice Monkey upgrade to be able to practically but indirectly affect MOAB-class bloons. Other Ice Monkey upgrades cannot damage blimps even when there are nearby other bloons because blimps cannot be directly targeted by ice blasts unless upgraded to Tier 5 or Embrittlement, or can only hit blimps with either attacks produced from a burst or with the Snowstorm ability.