BiS Gear
The Best in Slot (BiS) Legendary, Weapon and Relics for Helena are shown below.
Best Helena Relics
Relics are entirely utility focused in Fellowship and they mostly aren’t unique to specific heroes so it allows for a lot of change. While you can use any relic, there are a couple that are especially notable and arguably the best of the bunch in a general sense.
S-Tier Relics
Saltwash Elixir - Instantly heals you for 40% of your max hp on a 2 minute cooldown. This Relic is already insane for Tanks and that’s before considering Helena specifically has no self-healing. A must-have for sure.
Sinbinding Stone - Grants 15% damage reduction to yourself and nearby allies for 15 seconds on a 3 minute cooldown. This Relic is extremely powerful, particularly on some of the harder bosses in the game.
A-Tier Relics
Grimoire Of Resurrection - A simple combat rez. It has a small cast time with a 5 minute cooldown. Great if your party lacks the ability to rez.
Ancient Wardstone - Instantly dispel all harmful magic effects from yourself and allies on a 2 minute cooldown. This can be extremely good in some dungeons depending on how you’re pulling, but it is over-shadowed by the S tier relics.
Ancient Poultry Fetish - Turns your target into a chicken. Permanently. This cannot be used on Bosses but there are pulls in dungeons where utilizing this Relic makes life so much easier. It has shared uses by the party on a 3 minute cooldown, so its value lessens with multiple users in the same party, alongside the fact there are much better relics on offer.
Orb Of Shadows - Party wide invisibility for 15 seconds on a 6 minute cooldown. There aren’t too many notable uses of this but it can be strong if you plan around skipping packs with this.
B-Tier Relics
Bloodrite Drums - A 12 second, 50% movespeed increase for you and your allies. It’s not great. It can be helpful to kite since you lack mobility on Helena but it’s one of the more lack luster options
Humming Portalstone - Opens an interactable portal. You can only have 1 of these active at any time and there is a short cooldown on how often you can take the portal. It has a 2 minute cooldown. With co-ordinated play it could be useful but for most it’s not a great option.
Best Helena Weapons
In general there aren't a whole lot of options for weapons right now as Helena, but there are a couple clear outliers in regards to strength that are worth talking about.
Fateful Arms - A 60 second cooldown cleaving strike that’s on the global cooldown. It provides a 20% buff to your expertise stat as well as granting 200% increased CDR for the 6 second buff duration. If used at range it will also charge you to your target. This weapon isn’t as strong offensively as Sahril's Arms, however defensively it can be very strong, giving you significant CDR to everything on a short cooldown. Most notably this includes Shields Up and Grand Melee. This weapon has very high potential.
Sahril's Arms - on a 90 second cooldown this has the on-use effect of self-applying an absorb for essentially your entire health bar. When the absorb is depleted or expires, it explodes to deal massive fire damage.
Weapon Traits
Due to the random nature of Weapon Traits, it can be a game of cat and mouse trying to get the ideal weapon tree. You have two offensive rows, two defensive rows, and a major capstone, with multiple options in each row for different pathing up the tree. With that in mind, you can start to see how gaining access to a "BiS" set-up might prove tricky. Don't be afraid to use some materials to reroll Traits if you need to.
Below I'll separate and list the ideal weapon traits for each type.
Major Capstone:
- S tier = Visions of Grandeur
- A tier = Brave Machinations
- B tier = Martial Initiative, Ruby Storm
- C tier = Sapphire Aurastone, Heroic Brand, Diamond Strike
- D tier = Amethyst Splinter, Emerald Judgment
Offensive Traits:
- S tier = Inspired Allegiance, Hunter's Focus
- A tier = Navigator’s Intuition, Kindling
- B tier = Seized Opportunity, Hidden Soul, Vengeful Soul
- C tier = Patient Soul, Willful Momentum
Defensive Traits:
- S tier = King of the Hill, First Man Standing
- A tier = Iron Spikes, Treasure Hunter's Delight
- B tier = Diving Mediation, Heart of Stone
- C tier = Grounded Spirit
- D tier = Latent Resurgence, Stalwart Readiness
Set Bonuses
Set bonuses have the capacity to be extremely powerful. Different dungeons drop different sets allowing you to farm your best in slot bonuses. Ideally you’ll only want 2 of your gear pieces to be a set bonus and the rest socket pieces (because of how gem power works). This allows us to fully maximise our gem power whilst also enabling ourselves with a powerful set bonus. Below I've listsed the most importnat set bonus you'll want to acquire for Helena as well as an alternative.
Dark Prophecy: This set gives your abilities the potential to increase your haste by 25% for 20 seconds. It procs roughly once per minute and is huge for Helena. More haste allows you to use more globals for more CDR on top of the GCD and Shields Up CD being hasted.
Drakheim's Absolution: This is a nice and simple 20% increase to Agility during your ultimate.
Legendary
On Helena you have 3 Legendaries, with only one being a very clear winner. The other 2 options aren't in a particularly great spot right now.
Warboots Of The Blackened Vanguard: This Legendary makes it so that when you Charge, it triggers a Shockwave on impact. This applies any talent effects such as Aftershock, and additional makes affected enemies deal 5% reduced damage to you for 5 seconds. The provided Shockwave also gives us our Veteran of War CDR to our other abilities, making it insanely strong in all aspects, both defensively and offensively.
Stats
The Stat priority for Helena is as follows:
- Item level / Strength
- Haste
- Spirit
- Expertise
- Critical Strike
Item level is king in Fellowship as your main stat has the greatest effect on your damage and survivability.
Haste decreases the global cooldown and your Shields Up, synergising extremely well with your Veteran of War passive.
Spirit decreases the cooldown of your Ultimate slightly but more importantly gives you the chance to gain double CDR gained from Veteran of War.
Expertise increases how much damage you do and the size of absorbs you get.
Critical Strike only benefits your damage since you don’t have any self healing.
One thing to note about stats on Helena is that due to how strong diminishing returns are, once you hit roughly 20% of your ideal stats, it’s much more beneficial to start looking to boost others since it makes your Toughness more effective with each 1% of any given stat.
Gems
The gemming system in Fellowship is fairly unique. You can obtain powerful gems to attach to sockets in your gear, which can be fused together for upgrades at the cost of some currency.
I wouldn’t stress about min maxing this much early on as you won’t have much choice in regards to what gems you’re actually acquiring, and it’s much better to simply not reroll tier 1 gems and save your currency for higher tiers. Gems aren’t too important until around Paragon or higher.
An important thing to factor is your gears gem power. You obtain pieces of gear with gem power and want to prioritize socketing ones with more power attached. For example, Legendaries provide 100% gem power, whereas normal gear only provides 35%.
A simplification of gems:
- Topaz provides Haste
- Rubies provide main stat
- Diamonds provide all secondary stats
- Sapphires provide stats inside your ultimate
- Emeralds provide Expertise
- Amethysts provides Crit
When working with Tier 1 gems, I would prioritize the following:
Topaz > Diamond > Emerald > Ruby > Sapphire > Amethyst
Later on you'll ideally be putting all your eggs into the Topaz basket, netting yourself as much haste as possible. Once you've reached gem cap for Topaz you can look to put some into Amethyst assuming you're able to get to the 6th node.