Downgrade Layer

Downgrade Layer is an attack behavior characterized by stripping away a layer of the bloon regardless of its health. It is part of the damage types family. Pat Fusty's Big Squeeze and Benjamin's Syphon Funding are examples of this.

Downgrade Layer is represented on Bloons Wiki as, the ability icon for Benjamin's Syphon Funding. When it comes to MOAB-class bloons, which normally cannot be penetrated through, it is distinguished from Instakill Blimp and its subsets because Downgrade Layer will only guarantee stripping off the current layer (even MOAB-class), while Instakill Blimp kills all including descendants. It is not the same as Extra Damage and its subsets because Extra Damage is not a guaranteed stripping off the current blimp layer in the case of infinite-HP blimps, but rather Extra Damage does a flat amount of extra damage. If an attack's layer downgrading only applies to very specific bloons other than the highest-ranking blimps, it is considered Cleansing, a status effect, as is the case for Cleansing Foam's lead-popping that doesn't hurt DDTs.

Syphon Funding and Big Squeeze have different means of handling the children of downgraded bloons. Big Squeeze releases all the blimp's normally spawning children upon Pat letting go of the blimp, while Syphon Funding does not release these extra children when the bloon enters the screen. Thus, when Pat squeezes a BFB, four MOABs will spawn, but Syphon Funding will turn the BFB to only one MOAB.

All attacks require an upgrade to apply Downgrade Layer behavior.