Playstyle Overview
Helena revolves around Toughness management, with the goal of benefitting from her Veteran of War CDR as much as possible to deal damage and have high uptime on Shields Up. To achieve this we follow a couple simple rules.
Do not waste CDR: Almost all of your rotational abilities provide CDR to each other and your cooldowns. It’s important to learn what reduces what and ensure you’re not losing casts, particularly of Shockwave and Shields Up.
Smooth Damage intake: Use Shields Up when you have less than 40% toughness, your block buff is about to expire, or you’re about to overcap charges. You can use Iron Wall to prevent your Toughness from reducing for a period, allowing you time to regenerate Shields Up charges when you run out.
Toughness
We’ve mentioned Toughness a handful of times now and how important it is to manage properly, so let’s actually talk about it. Toughness is a mitigation mechanic unique to Helena, displayed as a bar to the right of your character.
The more Toughness you have, the less damage you take, with each notch on the bar providing different amounts of damage reduction. These notches account for 10% DR, 30% DR, 50% DR and lastly 70% DR from bottom to top. You lose Toughness whenever you take any form of damage and gain it through Shield Slam or using Shields Up. The effective cap of your Toughness is increased by your strength and secondary stats. Managing this mechanic is key to surviving on Helena.
Outside of Shields Up, the only other cooldown that interacts with Toughness directly is Iron Wall. It prevents your Toughness from being lowered during its 12 second duration. It’s generally best to use this when you’re out of Shields Up stacks to buy yourself time to regenerate charges. You ideally want to be in that 50% DR threshold at minimum when you press this, so that only a couple Shield Slams will have you hit the cap. It’s also an extremely strong cooldown against certain boss abilities that deal large amounts of damage over time as you guarantee you’ll have a large amount of DR for the entire damage event.
Rotation
Due to the cooldown reduction from Helena’s Veteran of War Passive as well as her Spirit Stat, there is less of a strict rotation and more of a priority system.
This priority is as follows:
- Shockwave
- Shield Slam
- Hold The Line
- Shield Slam
- Shield Throw
- Charge
- Sweeping Strike
- Power Strike
- Measured Strike
Shockwave provides CDR to Shields Up, does large damage, and applies a damage increase with talents.
Shield Slam gives CDR for Shockwave and 25% Toughness.
Hold The Line resets the cooldown of Shield Slam and empowers it to give you an absorb shield on use.
Shield Throw provides CDR to Shockwave.
Charge gives CDR to Shockwave, Shield Slam, Shield Throw and Shields Up. It is important to get all affected abilities on cooldown as soon as possible so you can use this to benefit from the huge amounts of CDR and not waste any uses. It also stuns the target you use it on.
Sweeping Strike is your only offensive button that has nothing else attached to it. It’s a lot of damage so you want to use it as often as possible.
Power Strike provides CDR for Shield Slam and Shield Throw.
Measured Strike is simply your filler ability when everything else finds itself on cooldown. It’s not used super often.
Utility
Helena’s Grand Melee is one of, if not the strongest utility ability in the game. It grants 20% magic damage reduction to both you and your allies within its circle, making it a valuable group defensive.
However, the more notable part is the 10 second AOE silence, which forces all affected enemies to only auto attack. This not only makes it significantly easier to group stubborn mobs, but also prevents dangerous enemies from applying their usual debuffs. This alone enables you to route more aggressively than usual.
The only downside of this ability is that it aggro’s any enemies inside its radius, so you have to be aware of your surroundings when it’s active.
Ultimate Ability
Siegebreaker is Helena’s Ultimate. It provides 25% damage reduction for its duration, as well as a 25% increase to the damage of Shield Slam, Shield Throw and Shockwave. It also provides double CDR from your Veteran of War passive allowing you to spam major abilities with ease.