Plants vs Zombies 2 - Plant of the Week - Noctarine - February/March 2024

35 Noctarine seeds are awarded for completing this event consisting of five (5) levels.

Plant of the Week - Noctarine - was offered between February 24, 2024 through March 2, 2024.

Noctarine is a member of the Conceal-Mint family.
Noctarine costs 150 Sun. (-25 Sun at levels 2, 3, 7 and 10.)
When planted, Noctarine releases poison gas in a 3x3 area. Zombies in this area take 20 damage. (+20 damage on levels 3, 5, 7 and 9.)
Should the tile be powered up by a Shadow effect, Zombies will take 40 damage. (+20 on levels 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10.)
These zombies also take 1.5x damage from Conceal-Mint plants. (+0.1x on levels 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10.)
Should the tile be powered, this damage will be 2.1x of normal. (+0.1x on levels 3, 5, 7 and 9.)
Zombies affected by this cloud have a 25% chance to explode. (+5% per level.)
This explosion will do 10% of the zombies maximum health to all zombies in a 3x3 area.

Commentary:
Can poison zombies.
Makes zombies take multiplier damage.
Chance for zombies to become miniature Cherry Bombs.
We need to take a closer look.

Bottom Line:
The problem with plants which do many different things is that they never do any of them well. This is one such case.

The question to ask is what is the best use case for this plant? This plants seems to want to be planted on the zombies on the right side of the lawn. But there are no shadow plants there.

Planting Noctarine on the left side of the lawn basically means this is a temporary Moonflower. Why not just use Moonflower instead?

We're just not sure how to best use this plant and if we can't, how good can Noctarine be?

+Timestamps
00:00 Level 1
00:57 Level 2
02:06 Level 3
04:01 Level 4
0x:xx Level 5 - Did not record. 😢️ To get past, Shadow Peashooters on Column 1, Dusk Lobbers alternating on Columns 2 and 3 with Nactarine to power up the other Shadow plants. Basketball Catapult zombie making a cameo from the original game can make this difficult. Spikerocks on Column 9 can handle those.