Rumblebee vs Sunflower

[DDburst]

Decided to make a summoner and am enjoying it so far. But was wandering which one is preferred for both party and solo play pve-wise.

[Rylen]

sunflower is pretty much the best, and it's on aoe, great for clearing trash

[Engete]

sunflower need a lot of focus, but had a higher output dmg, and AoE... 

rumblebees is pretty much straight forward projectile attack dps... 

 

sunflower need decent latency to do the rotation smoothly (and correctly), so you will be able to preserve your focus and summon the big sunflower overflow cannon for the highest dps of summoner... 

while with rumblebees form 1 only need to hold RMB and hope for crit so it could save some chi and do some additional dmg... :v

form 2 rumblebees could inflict DoT, but with longer cast time and cooldown...

form 3 rumblebees depend on special cases to be effectively used... 

 

personally i often use rumblebees form 1 because of latency and my bad skill rotation... XD 

but sometimes i use sunflower if the party dont need cat tank so i spec my cat to focus generator...

i dont really like form 2 and 3, so i rarely used that... *actually only used to testing and never used them again... ~~

[Careyni]

Rumblebees form 1 is good for single targets, sunflower is good for multitraget. Best use for sunflower is to pop a couple focus regen skills so you can spam 5+ sunflower (15+ focus cost). This will put photosynthesis at 5 stacks and pretty much let you spam at will for a bit (managed a few runs of 20-30 secs). Rumblebees is best to use on form 1 so you can move while casting. Also, if you have a decent crit rate, it should reset focus cost often.

[TalonShina]

I have one summoner I used sunflower on and I loved it. 

Wanting to change a few things including character name and look plus some skills I recreated and am now a rumblebees summoner love that too 

[Myleina]

It depends on you. Sunflower = gotta get your rotation going and pay attention, whereas rumblebee = hold left click and be lazy.  Do note that you need good amount of crit for rumblebee to be decent.

 

Friends have told me Sunflower > Rumble for Mushin, yet I clear way faster with Rumblebee (I have 52% crit currently).  With sunflower, I'm paying way too much attention to my Focus and trying to manage it that I end up losing DPS/nearly die because I dont pay attention to boss. I only use sunflower on Floor 3 (For aoe) and on floor 5 (one of the orb gives infinite focus).

[DDburst]

So in terms of rumblebees what do you guys think the minimum crit should be for it. I was thinking somewhere along the lines of 50% or is 40ish good enough?

[Pinwheel]

Everyone should be aiming for 50% crit and 200% crit damage, then stacking attack after... but most just use unrefined pvp shields and infernal accessories so they sit closer to 25% crit and 170% crit dmg.

 

Over 50% crit, bees really start melting mobs in a hurry, you end up tanking most of the time.

[Reivur]

I was all about Sunflowers until the patch. Now Rumblebees feels great. I'd say you can make the transition at 45% at the earliest, but 50% would be better. By 50% your weapon procs, True Friend & Doom and Bloom should easily reset your focus for any bad streaks. And if  you have any spec'd grapplers in your party then it just becomes absurd. Another reason I like Rumble is outside of 4-mans with clan mates and in pugs or 24 man when people occasionally launch (Bleh :(  ) you aren't screwed like you normally would be with Sunflower.

[rocdog]

On 16/02/2016 at 10:22 AM, Reivur said:

Another reason I like Rumble is outside of 4-mans with clan mates and in pugs or 24 man when people occasionally launch (Bleh :(  ) you aren't screwed like you normally would be with Sunflower.

 

That's really the biggest downside of Sunflower, imo.   Targets get launched a lot in PUGs, and for no reason.

[Tavirez]

I was having a debate about Sunflower vs Rumblebees. Sunflower (based on my stats and such) does more damage since it does 5k-6k on crit, while Rumblebees does 3.5-4.5k on crit. However if I get a good crit roll on Rumblebees, thats 3.5k-4.5k crit every second or so for like 3-5 seconds. Versus Sunflower say if I run out of focus or mess up rotation, it is still good damage but if I get all 5 stacks of photosynthesis, I usually crit 2 or 3 out of 5 shots so sometimes I feel like Rumblebees is better. (BTW I do not know the damage before crit, I just notice the big YELLOW BRIGHT NUMBERS)

I'm pretty on the fence myself about switching in between abilities. What I do is switch to Rumblebees for bosses, and Sunflower for dungeons and such. 

[Pinwheel]

Idk about you, but my bees crit for 5-5.3k, standing right on top of things that's a constant stream of 5k instacasts, No way am I going to go sunflower and pray that no cc, launches, or repositioning screw up the rotation and destroy any dps. Totally not worth it.

[VirtuoZzzo]

I have 56% crit rate. It is not enough for keeping bees RMB pressin n' chillin. It goes on really long but not anough to recast D'n'B for focus regaining. I lack like 4-5 secs out of 18, which means you need even higher crti rate. I'll have like 58% after upgrading my accessory from infernal. I'll try again.

Right now only sunflower.

Btw bees are really good for pvp.

[Myleina]

7 minutes ago, VirtuoZzzo said:

I have 56% crit rate. It is not enough for keeping bees RMB pressin n' chillin. It goes on really long but not anough to recast D'n'B for focus regaining. I lack like 4-5 secs out of 18, which means you need even higher crti rate. I'll have like 58% after upgrading my accessory from infernal. I'll try again.

Right now only sunflower.

Btw bees are really good for pvp.

 

The thing is... Why would you use sunflower if you can upkeep your RMB that long with bees? You have to manage your focus with sunflower, you cant just spam it.. so ultimately you lose DPS. Over 50% crit I'm pretty sure rumblebee spam > sunflower.

[VirtuoZzzo]

1 minute ago, Myleina said:

 

The thing is... Why would you use sunflower if you can upkeep your RMB that long with bees? You have to manage your focus with sunflower, you cant just spam it.. so ultimately you lose DPS. Over 50% crit I'm pretty sure rumblebee spam > sunflower.

I can use sunflower infinite amount of time rotating LMB-RMB with taht high crit rate. LMB almost always crit, so my sunflower costs only 1 per cast. And i can do it till next dnb and so on.

With bees I really dont want to use LMB at all. It's a waste of dps cuz of LMB low damage. As soon as I'll be able to RMB bees infinetly for 18 sec while waiting for dnb, I'll use it. I definitly will be superior!

[Myleina]

This is why personal dps meter or like some kind of DPS meter on the dummies at Mushin is required... so we can test those build properly...

[Reivur]

One thing people are kind of glossing over is the speed that Rumblebees even launches. Of course Sunflower individually hits harder, but you get more Bees out in ten seconds than Sunflowers by a mile-- without setup. With a grappler assisting it becomes stupider, not to mention Hongmoon skill being an option shortly. Rumblebees is easily launching at a rate of 2.5 at minimum, possibly even 3 a second. This isn't even factoring focus costs or the need to blend in LMB's.

 

It feels disingenuous to go on about a 6k Sunflower and a 4k Rumble and then act like the 2k numerical suddenly makes Sunflower superior outright.

[Myleina]

Just now, Reivur said:

One thing people are kind of glossing over is the speed that Rumblebees even launches. Of course Sunflower individually hits harder, but you get more Bees out in ten seconds than Sunflowers by a mile-- without setup. With a grappler assisting it becomes stupider, not to mention Hongmoon skill being an option shortly. Rumblebees is easily launching at a rate of 2.5 at minimum, possibly even 3 a second.

 

It feels disingenuous to go on about a 6k Sunflower and a 4k Rumble and then act like the 2k numerical suddenly makes Sunflower superior outright.

 

One thing to keep in mind is there is the normal sunflower already doing more damage than rumblebee but also the super sunflower doing way more damage. And once you get the photosyntesis, that's 5 second of pure dps (with  hongmoon, otherwise 3sec). Also note that Critting with super sunflower makes your ThornStrike come back faster, which is one of your hardest hitting skill.

[Jixua]

sunflower takes too much focus early on and you don't need the aoe cause doom n bloom+briars kills most things.  stick with rumblebees early on

[hendrixx]

I can maintain rumblebees longer than SunFlower, and crit for about 4k per pop.

[PreceptorTeeth]

In the 24 man instances once you get your stacks up of fervour then rumblebees all the way. You can easily get over 100% critical rate, and put out insane amounts of DPS, far more than you can with sunflower.

 

Damage per focus point single target, bees is far superior. So for tanking yourself killing a single enemy, bees is usually the best way to go. However it still works best with your pet able to regen focus for you, as with over 50% crit rate, you often don't have a break in attacks, just some small slow down.

 

Aoe damage, I don't think anything in the game is anywhere near the over all DPS of sunflower. Get a Blade Dancer to suck in your enemy faction base in misty and melt them down, you will see.

At the end of the day, I have an Awakened Pirate staff, true siren ring, everything else siren and I pull agro off a Blade Dancer who has 1 more true siren item than me with Sunflower in single target, and MUCH faster with bees. So it really doesn't matter, we can output far more DPS than is required in most situation to the point we have to manage our DPS so we don't get ourselves killed.

 

[Phorni]

If u are in a pt then use sunflower for clearing mob waves and bee form1 for boss fight,  if u r soloing then depends on the boss, I will use mushin tower for example on 5f sunflower is a lot stronger than bee but requires u to either have really good dps to kill it before u r done with the red n blue buffs or u need to be cautious with ur focus, whereas on 7f bees are lots stronger cos junghado likes flying around and u want to cc him to bits

[3ternalkarma]

iirc sunflower is pve and rumblebee is pvp when you get the HM skill

[Arknarter]

I prefer Rumblebees on my Summoner. Im playing a lot of PvP and bunch of PvE. On PvP it is kinda RNG cuz of your critical (you crit = its free and instant), its cheaper to use than Sunflower. On PvE if you are stacking Crit it should be easy to do a lot of insta crits :)

[Phorni]

23 hours ago, Arknarter said:

I prefer Rumblebees on my Summoner. Im playing a lot of PvP and bunch of PvE. On PvP it is kinda RNG cuz of your critical (you crit = its free and instant), its cheaper to use than Sunflower. On PvE if you are stacking Crit it should be easy to do a lot of insta crits :)

If u get the hongmoon tech from bsh4/6 u can use bees on all cced target instantly for free