BiS Gear
The Best in Slot (BiS) Legendary, Weapon and Relics for Helena are shown below.
The Linked Heavy Metal Cloak is the best Legendary for Helena generally speaking in Early Access Season 3. It provides a substantial amount of additional toughness generation, while also dealing very large amounts of uncapped AoE damage with Shockwaves. The amount of CDR this legendary provides means it's the highest damage potential AoE and the best Legendary choice for Toughness generation. Comparing this to her Bindings Of The Blackened Vanguard this also allows us to keep Charge as a single target stop, another huge positive to using this Legendary over the wrist option.
Legendaries
On Helena you have 3 Legendaries - The Wrists, Cloak and Ring.
The Bindings Of The Blackened Vanguard has generally been considered the best Legendary in Seasons 1 and 2 due to the large amount of damage and cooldown reduction it provided, making it the largest amount of Shields Up CDR and therefore Toughness generation available. For every Charge, you also send out a Shockwave, providing damage and Toughness. You also get 5% Physical damage reduction. It does have the downside of making Charge effectively a rotational button.
The Masochistic Razor Loop has a lot of potential to be great on some of the hardest hitting bosses in the game. It does nicely return Charge to our toolkit as a single target stun, something you're otherwise lacking when compared to the Bindings.
The Linked Heavy Metal Cloak grants you an additional charge of Hold The Line and makes the cooldown hasted. This legendary provides the largest amount of CDR and therefore Toughness generation out of the options. In combination with certain talents this can be a ridiculous amount of damage and tankiness specifically on thrash packs. This legendary in my opinion is the best option until extremely high eternal when bosses start taking longer and longer.
Weapons
In Early Access Season 3 there are 2 highly competitive weapon options for Helena.
Darkfrost Arms - A 30 second cooldown, single target icicle attack that stuns the target for 3 seconds and deals a small amount of damage. 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 for us, attack speed by 40%. Affected enemies all take DoT damage throughout the debuff duration. This Weapon effectively provides 40% damage reduction against the most prominent source of damage in the game as a tank: Melee attacks. It's very powerful and with specific gear set-ups you can get this to very high uptimes. A single target stop, an AoE slow and attack speed slow, and a large amount of damage on a low cooldown, makes this weapon extremely strong.
Fateful Arms - A 60 second cooldown cleaving strike that's on the global cooldown. It provides a 200% increased CDR buff for 6 seconds. If used at range it will also charge you to your target. This weapon is very good, particularly in the early game when 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.
Sahril's Arms - A 90 second on-use absorb shield for what is essentially your entire health bar. When the absorb is depleted or expires, it explodes to deal a large amount of damage. It's not a bad option, particularly in high magic damage dungeons, but it just doesn't provide the same value as the main weapons listed above.
Gear Sets
Set bonuses have the capacity to be extremely powerful in Early Access Season 3. Different dungeons drop different sets allowing you to farm your best in slot bonuses. Below I've listed the a handful of most important set bonuses you'll want to acquire for Helena.
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.
Seal Of The Heskyr: This set empowers your Gem Power by a significant amount (+25%). Because of this it's quite weak early on, but scales extremely strong end-game once you have your ideal gem set-ups and Essence bonuses.
Torment Of Bael'aurum: A cheat death effect that heals you for 35% of your Max Hp when you dip below 20% health. It also provides a flat 4% Strength. Definitely a must have.
Tuzari Grace: Helena lacks mobility so the 20% movespeed can help make up for that. An additional 4% 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.
Tanks however, previously had the ability to loot Sinbinding Stone removed, and instead tanks can now obtain a personal damage reduction Relic: Obsidian Sigil. It's a 60 second cooldown, 30% damage reduction for 6 seconds. It's an entirely extra defensive and with the limited number we have at our disposal to stop incoming damage, this is extremely important and should be acquired and used as soon as possible.
Trait Synergy: In Early Access Season 3 we've also had the re-introduction of a Trait called: Treasure Hunter's Delight. This effectively gives us damage reduction whenever we activate a relic. At lower ranks it's not enough and can be ignored for whatever utility relic you prefer, however, at max rank it's worth utilizing and aiming for in an end-game set-up even if it effectively lessens your ability to use relics to help your route or team.
The other relic options we have at our disposal are listed below.
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. This is the lowest cooldown relic and pairs very nicely with the Treasure Hunter's Delight trait.
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.