Hand Kiting

What is Hand Kiting

Hand Kiting is a common term used to describe the act of kiting the Soul Feast (the "hands") mechanic at Deimos. This involves being the most distant player from the boss and using multiple survivability skills to stack the AoEs in neat piles, such that they aren't a threat to the group and aren't absorbed by Deimos.

The Basics

For the entire encounter (after Deimos spawns), every 10 seconds the most distant player from the boss will be targeted by Soul Feast. Every second for five seconds, a small cluster of hands will spawn under the player, ticking damage every second. After the last one drops, there will be a gap of five seconds before a new target is selected and another set begin to spawn. The job of the hand kiter is to always be the target, and drop the hands at a safe distance from the rest of the group. In a perfect world, the hand kiter can stack each set of five at the same location without dying, then move slightly and recover health before the next set appear. The most important thing though is to ensure you survive, so move as much as you need to stay alive as if you get downed you will be very difficult to save.

In addition to dealing with the hands, you will not be able to return to the safety of the bubble for Mind Crush, and so you need to have some method to survive it: Blocks, damage negation and invulnerability all do the job.

Requirements

At a bare minimum:

• Substantial self-healing and/or damage reduction
• Enough blocks, damage negation and invulnerability that you can use on every ~35 seconds
• Make sure your toughness is lower than the tank's!
• You will likely need the "Character Model Limit" in the options to be at least set to medium, as any lower can result in culling the hands

Once you've sorted out the basics, you can fill out the build with other powerful options:

• Even more blocks or damage negation to allow you to stack up as many hands as possible
• Sources of Protection and Regeneration
• Healing skills that convert incoming damage to healing are incredibly potent

If you are confident in your ability to survive, you can then look at ways to provide benefits to the rest of your party - this could be something as simple as having a ranged CC to help them deal with Saul, or ranged healing to provide extra support. Some builds are even able to function as a subgroup's boon support while hand kiting!