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
• Traits that automatically trigger to prevent you being downed

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!

Builds

Every class has at least one spec that can successfully hand kite, but some are certainly stronger than others. First, we will outline the decisions that go into the builds.

Traits and Skills

The first place to look is for traits that offer damage reduction, and those that provide healing. It is quite common for a class to have specific traitlines for each of these, which makes them easy choices to take. Similarly, look for skills that offer healing, defensive boons, or damage reduction.

Gear

• All your gear should have healing power, and you will typically want some concentration as well.
• Toughness will make things easier, but be sure not to have more than the tank (it can even be beneficial to make sure there is a second player with more toughness than you, in case the tank dies).
• Vitality can help, but it is a double-edged sword as Mind Crush deals 70% of your max health as damage after it hits. So the higher your health, the more you will have to heal.
• It is very possible to just re-use gear from a heal build, but you may wish to run something safer while learning the role.

Runes and Sigils

Similar to gear, you can reuse your healer's runes (probably Rune of Superior Rune of the Monk, but be aware that the bonus healing does not apply to you). Some popular options:

• Rune of Superior Rune of the Water offers loads of boon duration
• Rune of Superior Rune of the Rebirth can save you from death once every 90 seconds, which can be very helpful while learning
• Rune of Superior Rune of the Defender is very potent on classes that use a lot of blocks
• Rune of Superior Rune of Sanctuary is useful on classes that predominantly rely on healing rather than damage negation

Food and Utility

Since the introduction of ascended food it is very easy to get a -10% damage effect, but are good on a budget.

As mentioned before, outgoing healing modifiers don't affect you so the choice of utility consumable is not too important. Just pick something that converts into concentration and/or healing power.