Lightning Reed

**Lightning Reed** is a attacking plant that is available for Plants vs. Bloons.

## **Tower Info**

**Lightning Reed** zaps bloons using its lightning, dealing damage to multitudes of Bloons nearby. He has many powerful upgrades to wreak bloon havoc and such. His Ability casts out very powerful, unstable and filamentous lightning at vile Bloons!

## **Upgrades**

***Left path upgrades***:

**Effect:** Increases lightning pierce to thirteen from nine.

**Tier:** 1

**Effect:** Increases lightning pierce to twenty-five from thirteen.

**Tier:** 2

**Effect:** Gives all nearby plants bonus attacking plant and camo detection, as well as detecting Camo Bloons for himself. Also pierce of lightning is increased to forty-one from twenty-five.

**Tier:** 3

**Effect:** Main attacks do five layers worth of bloon damage, now stuns child Bloons for three seconds and can stun MOABs and DDTs (excluding BFBs and ZOMGs) for 0.75 seconds. Lightning Reed's Incandescence now boosts Attack range of nearby plants by 25% instead of 15% and gives nearby Plants' attacks and abilities (excluding Peashooting plants) electrically powered attacks.

**Tier:** 4

***Right path upgrades***:

**Effect:** Casts out lightning 0.25 seconds quicker.

**Tier:** 1

**Effect:** Increases attacking range by 25 points.

**Tier:** 2

**Tier:** 3

**Effect:** Unlocks the Thunderstorm ability for Lightning Reed. When activated, Lightning Reed fires out a continuous stream of lightning that does eight damage to a single Bloon, four bonus damage to MOABs and does insane extra damage to stunned Bloons and fires out twenty lightnings per second, lasting the ability for eight seconds and can fire up to hundred and sixty lightnings. Lightning Reed's Ability has a recharge cooldown of 30 seconds after use and his main attack fires quicker and does more damage.

**Tier:** 4

## **Strategy**

### **Summary**

Lightning Reed plays as a electric plant who casts out powerful lightning at ferocious Bloons. His main role has some synergistic uses with certain Plants to help you out. He casts out lightning which has a lot of pierce but the only downside is it cannot beat stronger Bloons such as Ceramics unless Stunning Lightning is bought. Lightning Reed can help you out during the early game rounds, also good in the midgame due to his versatility.

### **Tips**

* **Lightning Reed** is a decent starting plant to help you hold the Bloons off. It's high piercing lightnings can help out during the early and mid game rounds whilst farming with Sunflowers to actually greed and farm more suns. However, Lightning Reed is a relatively good plant to use.
* **Lightning Reed** has a mild camo weakness, so nearly every plant can deal with Camo Bloons such as Peashooter, Dandelion, Cabbage-pult and Gatling Pea etc, but he now has a newly reworked upgrade that can delete his camo weakness now.
* **Lightning Reed** falls off super late game due to lack of MOAB popping power beside ability spamming. It's somewhat situational because Thunderstorm can actually shred through MOABs if you get enough x-4 Lightning Reeds and the ability can self-target Camo Bloons additionally.

## **Version History**

Lightning Reed felt lacklustre at first due to lack of usage in certain plant combos. The released version has buffed and reworked him in someway, mainly the Thunderstorm upgrade alongside with the Ability. He has received another change making plants synergistic with Lightning Reed such as Kernel-pult.

V1.0
* Cost of Thunderstorm increased ($5,000 → $6,000).
* Thunderstorm now increases Lightning Reed's main attack damage from 2 → 3
* Thunderstorm now increases Lightning Reed's main attack speed from 1s → 0.75s
* Thunderstorm ability lightning now prioritizes strongest Bloons.
* **[bug]** Thunderstorm ability lightning prioritization remains "Close".
* **[undocumented]** Thunderstorm ability damage increased significantly.

V3.0

* Stunning Lightning stun duration increased from 1s → 1.25s.
* Lightning Intensification stun duration to moabs increased from 0.33s → 0.5s.
* Lightning Intensification stun duration to child bloons increased from 1s → 2s.
* Lightning Intensification now grants +1 bonus damage to stunned Bloons for attacks.
* Thunderstorm now does +4 bonus damage to stunned Bloons with filamentous lightning.
* **[bug]** Thunderstorm bonus damage to stunned Bloons now acts up against Bloons which aren't stunned, dealing too much damage than intended.

V5.0

* Stunning Lightning upgrade renamed to Incandescence and got reworked from allowing his attacks to stun Bloons with more pierce to emitting a special light for camo detection and bonus attacking range for nearby Plants so as a pierce increase to LR's main attack.
* Lightning Intensification renamed to Electroluminescence and got reworked from doing more and stunning stronger Bloons and child Bloons for longer to adding electrically powered lightning to non-Peashooting plants' projectiles and ability projectiles as well as increasing damage, stuns Bloons and MOABs and has an aura of stunning that does damage and stuns Bloons for longer.
* **[bug fix]** Thunderstorm no longer does too much damage to Bloons (mainly because of bonus stunned Bloons damage being bugged).

## **Gallery**

A 4-2 Lightning Reed attacking a MOAB class bloon
## **Trivia**

* Lightning Reed is a plant from the PvZ series, who casts out powerful lightning at zombies.

* Lightning Reed is a solid plant in PvZ2, but in PvB he wasn't that good as of 3.0 update.