BiS Gear
The Best in Slot (BiS) Legendary, Weapon and Relics for Helena are shown below.
The Masochistic Razor Necklace is generally considered the best Legendary for Helena, especially on tough bosses. However some top Helenas prefer Warboots Of The Blackened Vanguard - it is generally more effective on large trash pulls since Shockwave is uncapped.
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.
Master Traits
Martial Initiative is our best Master Trait, especially when playing with the Blessing Of The Commander - II (Emerald Gem capstone). Visions Of Grandeur with heavy Spirit / Sapphire Gems is also viable but timing dependent in higher keys. The other Traits aren't super useful defensively but can contribute a lot of damage.
Heroic Traits
Inspired Allegiance is the best Heroic Trait by far, especially when combined with Martial Initiative. After that, Kindling and stat boosts are your best bet. Haste is generally great on Helena but if you are deep into DR then it can be worse than certain other traits.
Defensive Traits
Treasure Hunter's Delight and King Of The Hill are the best Defensive Traits for tanks. Treasure Hunter's Delight in particular can be combined with low cooldown Relics to give you more cooldowns to fill your gaps. After that, you want to prioritize things that give you damage reduction over things that give you max HP.
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 maximize our gem power whilst also enabling ourselves with a powerful set bonus. Below I've listed the most important 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.
Tuzari Grace: Helena lacks mobility so the 20% movespeed can help make up for that. 3% haste is a nice bonus as well.
Legendary
On Helena you have 3 Legendaries - the neck, boots, and cape.
The Masochistic Razor Necklace is generally considered the best legendary by most top Helena players due to the damage and damage reduction it gives from Shield Throw - it is particularly effective against difficult bosses.
The Warboots Of The Blackened Vanguard are also viable, granting a Shockwave for every Charge you do, and some physical DR from Shockwave. This in turn gives you a lot more uses of Shields Up - very good against large trash pulls.
The Unscarred Vigilante's Cape grants you some DR and damage while empowered Shield Slam's shield holds. Unfortunately in high eternal that shield doesn't tend to last very long so this legendary isn't as great.
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 Gem System in Fellowship is fairly unique. You can obtain powerful gems to attach to sockets in your gear, which gives you Gem Power that enables different Gem Bonuses. There are multiple Gem sizes that provide you with more Gem Power. You can combine 3 of the same gem type and size using Gem Fusion (Master Craftsman Braggi NPC) to create a gem of the next size up.
It’s worth noting that some socketed gear can additionally drop with a 35% gem power increase (100% for a Legendary). This makes it so you’ll want to prioritize socketing higher quality gems into these items. For example, Legendaries come with a 100% increased gem power socket, making it ideal for your larger gems.
Gem Types & Bonuses
The Gem types each follow a pattern of the type of bonus they provide, a simplification of the Gems is shown in the table below.
| Gem Type | Gem Bonus |
| Ruby | Main Stat / Boss Combat Buffs |
| Amethyst | Critical Strike |
| Topaz | Haste |
| Emerald | Expertise |
| Sapphire | Stats during Ultimate Ability |
| Diamond | All Secondary Stats |
Helena Gem Priority
The early game Gem priority for Helena is the following:
Topaz > Diamond > Emerald > Ruby > Sapphire > Amethyst
Later on you'll ideally be putting all your eggs into the Emerald and Topaz baskets, netting yourself as much Expertise and Haste as possible. Once you've reached gem cap for Emerald (2,640) and reached Feline Grace - II for Topaz, you can put your final gem in Amethyst for a nice little damage boost.
This end-game gem set-up is shown below (mouse over the icons for information about each ability):
It's worth noting that there are multiple viable end-game gem builds for Helena including a Spirit (Sapphire) build and maxing out Topaz instead of Emerald.
You can use Method's Gem Calculator to play around with different configurations and create your own.