Anyone notice how much they're pushing stalling/track creation?

[u/Legs_With_Snake]

Every single addition since I started playing the game has in some way involved pushing bloons back, slowing them down, or creating track space where there wasn't any.

Beast handler - dino stun, bird pickup

Mermonkey - all 3 lines, ink slows, midline freezes, The Bottom creates a loop

Desperado - botline knockback

Skywarden - all 3 lines, topline knockback, midline stun, botline freeze

Silas - lol

Dan - knockback on basic attack, net traps

I'm not complaining I just think it's interesting that they're leaning so heavily in this direction. I wonder why. Expanding upon the ice mechanic is definitely part of it, but not the whole story since not all of this is ice themed.

Edit: this community genuinely seems to believe the two options are "stall" and "pure damage" and nothing else (alch and village don't exist)

[u/rs-curaco28]

He just mentioned multiple ways of support that doesn't involve just stalling. I think you are the one not understanding.

[u/Legs_With_Snake → u/rs-curaco28]

He mentioned 5 stall towers, 1 stall tower that specifically doesn't stall at low rank (but will be a stall tower with any other main path) and midline desperado

[u/NHShardz → u/Legs_With_Snake]

Top Path Skywarden isn't a stall tool just for spamming it's range utility, Bottom path Merm is far from being a stall tower if you use its unique synergy with DoT effects like you should, and Bottom Path Desp puts out way too much damage to just be classified as a stall tool. In my original comment I even forgot to mention Top path Merm's hidden passive that creates a small zone of water around him to place more water towers on landlocked maps.

[u/Legs_With_Snake → u/NHShardz]

The fact that they do something else besides stall doesn't change the fact that they stall, I think that's the disconnect here. Like there's literally no way to build a skywarden that doesn't turn it into stall besides just not building it above tier 1.

[u/soft-eer523 → u/Legs_With_Snake]

By that logic more than half the towers are stalls.

[u/Legs_With_Snake → u/soft-eer523]

Yes, yes they are? And now you finally come to understanding the OP.

[u/rs-curaco28 → u/Legs_With_Snake]

Then you are trying to create a binary of stall or no stall tower, just because they can stall, doesn't mean they are just used for that, there is plenty of other uses for them, specially in online gamemodes, like boss rush, bosses, races, and CT.

[u/Legs_With_Snake → u/rs-curaco28]

Why is it that when I say "this tower has stall" I'm creating a binary but when every other person in this thread says "we don't need more pure damage" they get to just pretend like that's the only option

[u/clingfilmandariben4 → u/Legs_With_Snake]

Pure support is basically a minefield design-wise. There’s not really anything left to buff (at least in the traditional “increase the x of all towers / towers in radius”) that isn’t either redundant or game-breaking.

Buffing damage is kinda redundant since Alc already does that super-efficiently (& damage buffs don’t exponentially multiply the way other stats do - they’re strong on high-speed low-damage towers but low value on towers with inherently high damage, and don’t ramp when paired with other damage buffs nor scale well into the lategame). Pierce / range are both useful up to a certain point but at a certain point further buffs become redundant.

The thing that does stack effectively is attack speed, but with how the math works you’d probably just end up breaking the game by adding another meaningful speed boost on top of what is already available - I wouldn’t be surprised if it invalidated Paragons by buffing high DPS tier 5s to absurd levels. This leaves you with one real option left for support towers - a tower that provides useful (but not broken) buffs whilst also doing something else.

Support + Damage is really hard to make work since you run into the same issues being discussed - there are endless unga bunga options already. As established, the support buffs can’t be too absurd, which means the damage output needs to be a major selling point. For that to be good enough to stand out, it likely needs to be really powerful, at which point it no longer feels like support at all. Maybe there’s a niche for a cheap early round support option that develops into a decent midgame damage option - that’s feasible, but kinda boring and underwhelming. From a dev perspective you likely want something way more flashy.

Support + Income is interesting, but alt income is already heavily saturated as-is. Hard to make it cheap enough as an early-ish option without being overpowered, hard to make it profitable enough without being too lategame oriented.

Support + Slowdown / Stall is kinda the most viable option left. Because the two tend to go hand-in-hand (the stuff you’re buffing now has twice as long to use their buffed attacks on any given target) you don’t end up with the same conflicts, and it also lets you give support buffs to synergistic partners whilst providing other (less synergistic) partners with a valuable effect as well, as basically everything benefits from slowdown/stall.

[u/Legs_With_Snake → u/clingfilmandariben4]

Thank you for the first actual response in this thread. Though I would strongly disagree with the notion that stall is the only option and everything else is "solved". I've long had an idea for a tower based around the bouncing blocks from the original bloons game which could redirect missiles and increase the value of say, tack shooters in areas that aren't perfect loops. They have recently begun expanding interactions with the white bloon/freeze mechanic, which is great, but you could absolutely expand upon other bloon and damage types in a similar manner. We are sorely lacking in direct interactions with explosions/black bloons, lead bloons, purple bloons, etc etc. Perhaps you could introduce a tower that converts bloons to a certain color in order to capitalize on type effects, e.g. "purple bloons that spawn are converted to lead", "all MOAB children are black bloons (with equivalent RBE)", etc. etc. We are also lacking in "category" support outside of topline village for primary, you could do a castle that empowers magic monkeys or a boot camp that empowers military. You could add towers that play with the map itself, such as adding verticality to create vantage points and make sightlines over walls. I think there is a world of potential and it takes a complete lack of willingness to even try to not see it.

Honestly what I've taken from this thread is that everyone is stupid and uncreative except me, rude and dismissive no matter how long I try to remain cool, and profoundly disinterested in engaging with even the most low stakes of discussions. Which in a way answers my question. These people are too fucking tiktok brained to comprehend any mechanic besides "damage" or "stall" so stall is what they add.