Guild Wars 2

so I’m gearing a revenant. I have full exotic magi, and I’m wondering what are some tips to kite the hands in deimos?
Especially how do I even do it in the first place? What’s the goal to keep in mind etc?

also do I need toughness gear or no?

(From my experience)

No toughness needed.
Food not necessary but can be used (damage reduction or boon for more protection).

Ventari/Brill legendary.
Sword + Sword/Shield or Sword + Sword / Staff or if you wanna try kiter dps (not very useful tho) S/S + Hammer.
If you play hammer, you can save one block if you time your skill 3 to go into the bubble when he does the AoE.

Keep playing on Ventari and push heal when needed, you can actually spam it if you are lazy, combined with alacrity you can get your sword block skill 4 very often.
If you play with shield, I suggest to use it only on Brill legendary and get your passive heal on since you can’t move while using shield, hands will stack so when the shield is off, you might get some hands damage with bad tick timing. So active your heal before the end of the shield if you need to not fail.
When you want to use sword block, try to stack thoses 5 hands at the same spot, just spam once or twice the heal and take 3 first hands damages, use block before the 4th hand, with this, you should be blocking the 4th and the 5th hands and allowed to move safely to the next position.
When you are on Brill, try to always activate your elite skill + F2 if not on cd, stack as much as possible protection.
Brill heal can take the heavy AoE without any other block, you will survive and take no damage.

If you start with hands kiting, I’d recommand you a safe way to play with S/S+S
First wave of hands stacked with the sword method.
Second, take 3 hands damage with some ventari heal to recover + alacrity, move aside for 2 last, then move again.
Sword should be offcooldown for the 3rd waves so stack 5 agains with sword method.
Keep repeating.

When you see Deimos AoE, swap to Brill, passive heal + elite and F2. Shield when you have to take the damage. Before the shield going unactive, active heal and stack hands. with the protection on you, you should be able to tank 3/2 hands without heal, you will be like 50%hp mb. At this point you should be able to revover with ventari + sword.

Also :
I believe the AoE is triggered by certain HP remaining on Deimos (something like every 10 ?) because it’s different when I pug it, it comes way later than my static raid group.
I’d recommend you to not take the passive trait that proc shield when low on HP, you might actually die because of this (can’t move and stacking hands on you => rip)
When you get a bit of experience, you won’t need an healer anymore.
WHen you get pretty experimented on that, you should be able to stacks these 5 hands everytime easily and safely.

Good luck.