FFXIV Arcadion M2 guide – Honey B. Lovely boss skills and strategy

Take this Honey B. Lovelyboss skills list and strategy to heart and you’ll be able to bop along to the idol’s hits while avoiding her stings. Here’s your guide to the FFXIV Arcadion M2 fight.

The sting of the bee is strong with this one. Despite the pop anthem playing in the background, Honey B. Lovely can poke holes in your defenses with ease, subduing the party with a three-strike charm system and calling in the groupies to back her up. Familiarize yourself with her skills, take a deep breath, and take each one as it comes. That’s how you get the sweet nectar that is the raid loot tokens.

Honey B. Lovely skills

• Call Me Honey | Raid-wide damage
• Tempting Twist | Donut.
• Honey Beeline | front/back hit
• Honeyed Breeze | Tank-buster
• Honey B. Live | Raid-wide damage
  • Also begins the Charm phase.
• Charm phase
  • Love Me Tender | party-wide spread AoE markers followed by stationary meteor drops the first time (a trio of avoidable drops on each player the second time).
    • Applies one Heart with each hit.
  • Loveseeker | Summons a series of heart-shaped projectiles that travel slowly from Honey B. Lovely
    • Applies a heart on contact
  • Blow Kiss | Untelegraphed frontal cone AoE
    • Applies a heart
• Splash of Venom | Causes the next skill to leave blobs of exploding venom around the arena
  • Can also follow up with raid-wide spread markers
• Drop of Venom | Causes the next skill to leave blobs of exploding venom around the arena
  • Follows up the blobs with a stack marker
• Alarm Pheromones | Summons Groupbees on one quarter of the arena’s edge.
• Honey B. Finale | Signals a rapid-fire round of familiar mechanics

Strategy

Phase 0.5 – Introduction

Honey B. Lovely introduces you to a lot of her skills early on, casing Call me Honey for heavy raid-wide damage first, Tempting Twist to hit any players outside of her melee range, Honey Beeline to slam the front and rear, and a tank-buster your bruisers will want to spread out for.

Survive all that and you’ll reach her first real mechanic—Honey B. Live, which deals raid-wide damage and sticks a three-heart meter atop everyone’s heads.

Phase 1 – Charm

With the crowd now all riled up, your focus is to avoid getting hit three times. Max out that heart meter and you’ll get stunned and take heavy damage over time that’s a nightmare to heal through.

Love Me Tender forces everyone to accept a single heart. Meteor markers appear immediately after. Only one person needs to be in each drop, causing half the party to get their second heart (DPS preferred, but it isn’t strict).

She’ll then cast it a second time, summoning slowly-traveling heart projectiles from her person for the first part, and a triple set of area markers on each party member for the second. It’s easy to run into a heart while dodging dropped marker in this phase if you’re not careful.

Given there should be no healing necessary if people pay attention, healers should simply focus on avoiding the threats rather than fixing any mistakes others make: lest they accidentally cause a much bigger one.

Phase 2 – Venom

From this point on, Honey B. Lovely gains the ability to add Venom to her skills, modifying a few familiar attacks slightly by firing out venom blobs with each.

Just head to empty spots and keep as far away from them as possible. She’ll typically cast raid-wide spread markers at the same time, but these won’t land until after the venom globs explode. Don’t worry if you have to stack with the team: just spread later.

For the second instance, with Drop of Venom, she’ll do the same with Honey Beeline, following it up with a stack marker instead. Again, you’ll have time to group up after the venom globs explode. Don’t let her overwhelm you with information.

Phase 3 – Pheromones

Honey B. Lovely casting Alarm Pheromones signals a phase shift. Groupbees start to spawn along the edge of the arena. Note their spawn pattern and run clockwise or anti-clockwise to avoid them rushing forward, making a full revolution of the arena.

Once that finishes, more will command a quarter of the arena’s edge, rushing forward all at once to cover another quarter. The boss casts Honey Beeline at the same time, making only the outer edges of two corners of the arena safe.

After that sting of the bee, Honey B. Lovely re-introduces the Charm mechanic. This time, double stack markers appear to split the team in two to apply one heart to each player. Meteors then force all but two players to get their second. Then it’s a case of avoiding the hearts and drop markets to keep from getting a third.

The casting of Honey B. Finale after all that can spell disaster as she exits the Charm phase. The Groupbees return, this time rushing towards each party member, which can cause chaos. Survive that and you’ll only have her rapid onslaught of blob-infused skills to avoid until she’s down.