YMMV / Bloons Adventure Time TD

• Awesome Ego: Supermonkey can be a bit full of himself, but he certainly has what it takes to pop every bloon in his range.
  (when a MOAB-Class bloon appears) "Someone take a picture when I pop this guy! And make sure you get my good side!"
• Demonic Spiders: Dark Dirigible Titans (DDTs). When compared to its appearance in BTD6, DDTs are actually slower due to only moving as fast as a Green Bloon rather than a Pink Bloon. It does not distract from its various immunities to Sharp, Explosive, and attacks from towers unable to see Camo. They are also still rather fast and being a MOAB-class bloon will instantly cause a game over if one of them leaks. Likewise, they also tend to come in groups of three but spaced out enough to minimize grouped damage. Lastly, they can also have the Fortified property to make taking them down even harder with doubled health for it and its Camo Regen Ceramic bloons children.
• Game-Breaker: Many of the epic-tier weapons and trinkets can make the game MUCH easier, especially since, unlike character upgrades, once you equip them they don't cost you anything and are always active:
  • Marceline's Hambo turns character activated abilities from Awesome, but Impractical to Game-Breaker themselves, by halving their excessive costs while they're in range of Marceline. Marceline herself may be expensive to play at $1200, but with most activated abilities costing well over double that to unlock (so much that very few of them are worth buying compared to just placing more allies or buying more passive upgrades), she's definitely worth it. It's particularly good for making PB's Royal Decree easier to unlock^note OK, buying it at 50% off+Marceline's placement cost still costs only $50 less than just buying it outright, or even more if PB is using upgrade cost reduction trinkets, but getting Marceline, a very powerful character in her own right, is hardly a "small bonus" and once you have that (granting a free $750 every round) your money problems are pretty much over. It's also almost mandatory to unlock Supermonkey's Sun God upgrade, unless you want to pay $40,000 for that instead of $20,000!
  • The Wand of Dispersement is hands-down the strongest wand in the game, giving the wizard who wields it (Sam, Ice King or Flame Princess) +8 range (scaling with +0.5 range per star) and for Sam and Flame Princess, a base +3 damage with +1 damage per 4 stars^note It's supposed to give Ice King the damage boost too, but it's bugged. If that wasn't enough, it has an activated ability which instantly disintegrates the strongest bloon on the map and the only bloon which is immune to it is the BAD you face at the very end of an Impoppable run. Even the ZOMG that provides the final boss of an Extreme run gets turned to atoms with a single click, pretty much trivialising Extreme difficulty if you're lucky enough to get one of these. Furthermore, the Easter collection event for 2021 made this a Disc-One Nuke for any players active at that time. The event was guaranteed to give players a Wand of Dispersement once they progressed far enough, so you didn't even need to open any of those rare Epic orbs to get it.
  • The Epic Ally COBRA, the monkey secret agent, is ridiculously powerful, possibly the most-efficient income unit in the game. He costs only $400 to place and calls in a supply crate every few seconds that can give you either cash or a health restore; while the health restore is (as mentioned below) pretty useless, the cash crates aren't a handful of pocket change, but are worth $50-100 each. As a result he generates cash so quickly and reliably, without even requiring upgrades, that he'll have repaid his own cost in 1-2 rounds at most. And that's without mentioning that he's a pretty effective offensive unit as well, with a base 2 damage, and upgrades that double his attack speed, cause a passive 5 damage per second to any MOAB class balloon on the field, and reduce the cooldown of all your powers and activated abilities!
  • When the Thought Cannon Wand is on sale at Choose Goose's, buy it and give it to Flame Princess. With the Thought Cannon, dealing any damage to a MOAB tier Bloon will tag it, and once killed, it will give you a reward. These rewards include Wish Orbs, and the only limit is 30 Wish Orbs per game. Since common Wish Orbs give 10 shards at minimum, upon maxing this limit you will have at least 3000 shards worth of Wish Orbs, and it only takes 3500 shards to craft an Epic Wish Orb, guaranteeing an Epic item every two games at most. The only issue is that the TCW's drop chance on Wish Orbs is 5% overall, but on higher difficulties MOABs will be pouring in at such a frequency that reaching 30 Wish Orbs a game is easy.
  • Unlike his versions in BTD5 and 6, the Monkey Farmer has infinite range, allowing you to just put him anywhere and have him collect every cash bundle from Tuxedo Jake and collect from BMO. The only issue is that he's Legendary, and other than completing events, the only way to get him is an in-game purchase.
  • Speaking of, the Missile trinket is a super-rare trinket that adds an attack with infinite range to your characters. It's fairly weak on, say, Ice King, but on someone with high attack speed like Finn it results in a constant stream of missiles, especially when his Finn Sword's active ability is up. And did we mention it deals 30 damage to MOABs? When used with the above FPTCW combo, though, it allows her to hit MOABs from anywhere, and with the Monkey Farmer above, you won't even have to collect the loot.
  • Sam is an easy character to underestimate, because she's actually amazingly powerful. Her beam attacks give her an incredible attack speed that lets her rip through entire waves of bloons single-handedly, and her upgrades can increase her damage even further, allow her to attack 2 targets at once, and enhance her assault with bolts of chain lightning and fireballs that can pop lead, giving her outrageous DPS. Her utility upgrades can also polymorph a blimp, temporarily stopping its movement to let her pour on the DPS even more, create a portal at the end of the track which loops any normal bloons that slip through back to the start again, and let her detect camo bloons. Finally, her Meteor Storm ability is one of the strongest abilities in the entire game, letting her rain down 2000 or so damage over time on any area of the map that also stuns any bloons under it. She's effectively a Master of All, as her only weakness is an inability to deal with purple bloons due to them being immune to all her damage types. While she's not the strongest character in the game, being considerably outshined by the likes of Supermonkey, she's also incredibly cheap by comparison to those higher-tier units, only costing $550 to deploy. Give her the aforementioned Wand of Dispersement and a couple of other items and place someone else to deal with the purples for her, and she can carry you through almost an entire game nearly single-handedly.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Holiday BMO is considered just plain bad luck to get and despite his Legendary rarity is considered one of the worst income towers in the game, far worse than his regular counterpart (which is merely a Rare ally). This is because he only gives a fixed $320 per round (taking 21 rounds to make a profit), despite having to spend over $6000 to make him give that much (and at his base form, only gives $90 per round). In contrast, Royal Decree gives $750 per round and costs roughly half that much, and regular BMO costs a maximum of $1500 to give $1000 over a period of real time, not rounds (so stalls or long rounds where you wait for blimps to move to your towers aid a lot). Overall, Holiday BMO wastes way too much money to get very low profits that take too long to arrive.
  • Any trinket that restores a set amount of lives is prone to end up worthless due to taking up trinket slots that could be better spent on speed or damage-boosting items that would have prevented the life loss in the first place. Rubbing salt into the wound, there is a variety of life-restoration means that do not waste valuable trinket slots, such as Brofist (an upgrade), the Thought Cannon Wand (a weapon), and COBRAs (allies). Additionally, all life restoration effects are inherently worthless on Impoppable difficulty, due to you being a One-Hit-Point Wonder.
  • Juggernaut Max is considered, hands down, to be the worst party member in the game. This is due to him being focused on high-pierce attacks, as pierce is the game's local Dump Stat. Pierce is not helpful against health sponges like blimps that tend to come in small groups at worst, and many other characters (especially Flame Princess) have a much better balance between pierce and per-hit damage, the latter of which is much more effective against blimps.
  • Captain Cassie is not far behind Juggernaut Max in terms of infamy for being a useless party member. Her Master of None status is to blame. Her bomb attacks are better outclassed by the MOAB Maulers of C4 Charlie, and her water-based niche is quickly outclassed in DPS by her own Commander counterpart. Overall, everything the Captain can do, other towers do better.
  • The Blessed Dart has a poor reputation for being the worst Epic-level weapon in the game. It greatly boosts range and pierce; two stats that dart-throwing party members absolutely do not need much help for in the first place. The main reason why people use dart throwers like Supermonkey, Commander Cassie, and even Max is for damage output against blimps; the Blessed Dart is woefully inadequate for this task. Additionally, a Blessed Dart attack has a 10% chance of killing a bloon in one hit; except that this also does nothing against blimps and many towers who can equip the Blessed Dart have decent performance against regular bloons without the need of a One-Hit Kill.
• That One Boss: The BAD you have to face at the end of an Impoppable stage is a phenomenally tough target that can take the firepower of your entire grid to bring down as well as being immune to the majority of negative effects and special attacks, and even when you down it, it splits into multiple ZOMG and DDTs- but it's not this. No, the single most threatening enemy in the game is a Reinforced BAD, which has double HP (40,000)!
• That One Level:
  • Fire Trap, the third and final stage of the 'Burning Rubber' campaign. Unlike the majority of stages it has two doors for the bloons to enter through rather than one, and unlike other stages where this is the case the doors are very far apart (enough that only the longest-range characters would even have a chance of covering both) and send the bloons on paths that mostly run around the far edges of the screen, only converging right at the end when they reach their objective, Flame Princess in her lamp. This means you effectively have to set up two seperate defence grids to cover both paths, which goes from "hard" to "ridiculous" during the later stages of an Impoppable run, particularly the BAD in the final stage. Even the Dark Sun God Supermonkey has a hard time dealing with a BAD single-handedly, forcing you to rapidly reallocate all the now-redundant defence units to the side the BAD is coming down.
  • Cursed Mirrors at the end of Loch'd and Loaded features four short paths that ends in the middle of the map, and its formation means that you have to split your defense as well. A lot of players believe that this map can rival Bloody Puddles from BTD6.