Time to use flowers that heal and to throw sun everywhere!
HEAL FLOWER
Heal Flower is an ability for Sunflower exclusive to the GW games. This provides an additional way of healing your allies, at the added benefit at being able to heal yourself as well, unlike the Heal Beam which cannot heal yourself. This is a stationary healing station when placed, so placement is useful. This ability can also be great to utilise if your team really needs a burst of healing and they are congregating together, or if you are about to use Sunbeam, it can be placed really close to you, to heal you and allies that get close to it during the Sunbeam. The Heal Flower can even be healed by your Heal Beam, allowing it to stay alive longer and continue healing allies and you, although disappears after a while. I am a fan of this ability, it can really help improve my survivability while trying to heal allies when under fire.
GW Alternate Abilities
Dark Flower: This ability no longer heals you or your allies, but instead deals damage to enemies, which can be useful for extra firepower. The Dark Flower also has massive health for some reason compared to the other Heal Flowers. It has a dark appearance, hence the name, and it may be harder for enemies to notice it. It has good accuracy and deals decent damage, so if you want your Sunflower to be more offensive than supportive, this is the option. I actually like this alternate ability, although not as much as the Heal Flowers, although the extra firepower is nice and this could be good with Sunflowers that can already heal themselves with variants and whatnot.
Rainbow Heal Flower: This ability is only available in GW2 rarely from Rux, so look out for it if you want it. This is basically a cosmetic change to the regular Heal Flower, although with small changes. Instead of producing groups of sundrops at a time which provide decent healing, it instead produces 1 at a time, but at a faster rate so that it matches the heal rate of the regular Heal Flower. It overall produces 1 extra sundrop during its lifetime, which is minimal but could always be useful. I really enjoy this ability because of its awesome appearance and its slightly better healing.
SUNNY SIDE UP
Sunny Side Up is an ability for Sunflower exclusively in BFN. The overall healing that each use of this ability provides is not particularly great, although you get 3 charges and the cooldown is not too bad to deal with. This can be really useful for that needed burst of healing, it takes a while for each use of this ability to fully resolve and to produce all of the sundrops, although after you activate it, you can continue attacking, healing with the Heal Beam, or you could activate Sunbeam and provide your team with a bit of healing while using the ability. This is also a quite useful ability as you can heal yourself with it, instead of the Heal Beam. I like this ability decently, you can move around and it serves as a mobile but less effective Heal Flower, so it is useful but spammable.
BFN Alternate Upgrades
Shove (2 upgrade points): When you activate Sunny Side Up, you knock enemies that are very close to you away from you, which can useful if you have a close range enemy on you or enemies decide to get up close and personal with you and your team. This can allow you to use Sunny Side Up as a defensive mechanism and gives Sunflower a way of dealing knockback to her enemies. I find that this could be useful, although it is situational and this does not actually affect how well this ability heals you and your team.
Quick Egress (2 upgrade points): You move faster during a use of Sunny Side Up. This can be useful to avoid damage, retreat or get to allies that are in quite desperate need of healing. I find this upgrade really quite useful, especially as a way to get to allies that are at low health or that need healing. The speed boost can help to get out of a bad situation while healing yourself and allies that collect the sundrops, or it could even be used to speed boost yourself back to the team alternatively.
Conclusion
These abilities are really quite useful to have for the Sunflower as they complement the Heal Beam well, by allowing additional healing at one time when needed and as a way to heal yourself. These sorts of abilities would almost be expected on a healer, as the Heal Beam by itself is not as effective if multiple allies need lots of healing. It is also useful because you can activate these abilities just before Sunbeam and can be used when healing groups of allies as well. I like to make use of these where possible, but I find that deciding when to make use of these abilities are also important.
