BiS Gear
The Best in Slot (BiS) Legendary, Weapon and Relics for Helena are shown below.
The Warboots Of The Blackened Vanguard is generally considered the best Legendary for Helena, since Shields Up CDR is king. However some top Helenas prefer the Masochistic Razor Necklace as it's the most effective DR on some of the harder bosses in the game.
Legendaries
On Helena you have 3 Legendaries - the neck, boots, and cape.
The Warboots Of The Blackened Vanguard is generally considered the best legendary by most top Helena players due to the large amount of damage and cooldown reduction on it provides. For every Charge you do, it Shockwaves, providing damage and CDR. You also get 5% physical damage reduction.
The Masochistic Razor Necklace is generally considered the second best legendary due to the damage and damage reduction it gives from Shield Throw - it is particularly effective against difficult bosses.
The Linked Heavy Metal Cloak grants you an additional Charge of Hold The Line and makes the cooldown hasted. In combination with Unscarred Soul, this can be a solid defensive option, but it is typically worse than the other 2.
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.
Darkfrost Arms - A 30 second cooldown, single target icicle attack that stuns the target enemy for 3 seconds and deals a small amount of damage. This is our best weapon in late-game set-ups. When the effect expires, the target explodes to deal frost damage to all enemies around them and reduces movement speed by 65%, and more importantly, attack speed by 40%. Affected enemies all take DoT damage throughout the debuff duration. This weapon effectively provides 40% damage reduction from the most prominant source of damage in the game as a tank: Melee attacks. It's very powerful and with specific gem and weapon talent set-ups you can have this near 100% uptime in late game builds. As attack speeds don't stack, it also allows you to use this and claw back 2 talent points for other noteworthy options.
Fateful Arms - A 60 second cooldown cleaving strike that’s on the global cooldown. It provides a 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 as it once was, but it is still pretty good, even more so in the early game where you lack stats. It's defensively 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.
Gear Sets
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.
Relics
Relics are utility items that fill up 2 of your gear slots. They all have unique utility effects tied to them that enable you to do different things. From Shrouds and Portals that enable skips, to Damage reductions and Health potions. There are a lot of different Relics and each one serves a person to any given group, in any given dungeon. In the latest patch Tanks have had Sinbinding Stone removed from their loot tables and had it replaced with a new personal damage reduction relic: Obsidian Skin. It’s a 60 second cooldown, 30% damage reduction for 6 seconds. It's entirely extra defensive and with the limited number we have at our disposal to stop incoming damage, this is extremely powerful and should definitely be acquired as soon as possible.
The other options we have at our disposal are listed below and can be picked based on what you desire.
Saltwash Elixir - Instantly heals you for 40% of your max hp on a 2 minute cooldown. Likely your secondary option in most cases.
Grimoire Of Resurrection - A simple combat rez. It has a small cast time with a 5 minute cooldown.
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.
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.
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.
Bloodrite Drums - A 12 second, 50% movespeed increase for you and your allies.
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’s very useful.