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 5% DR, 15% DR, 25% DR and lastly 35% 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, Helena functions on a rotational priority system.
This priority is as follows:
- Sweeping Strike
- Shockwave
- Shield Slam
- Hold The Line
- Shield Throw
- Charge
- Power Strike
- Measured Strike
Sweeping Strike has 10% group DR and potentially 20% attack speed slow attached to it - send it off cooldown unless you need it to specifically be up for a certain mechanic.
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.
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.
Tips
One of the most basic, but important things you can do in Fellowship is mark specific targets or locations. In the input settings you will notice you have the ability to keybind “Mark Unit” and “Mark location”. These can be exceptionally useful for designating targets to kill or important stack points on bosses.
Interrupts
In Fellowship, interrupts are incredibly important, and as a result being able to see other party members interrupt cooldowns as well as let them see yours is key to success in a lot of dungeons. In input settings you can keybind “Select Interrupt Target”, which will attach a little Hero Icon on the nameplate of whatever target you choose. In combination with this you can then use the "Trigger Interrupt Target” key-bind to always interrupt that enemy when pressed. This allows you to be hitting different targets and able to swiftly interrupt without having to find the nameplate of your Interrupt target again. When used, it’ll show your interrupt is on cooldown to everyone in the dungeon and display a timer for when it’ll be ready again. It’s extremely handy and I 100% recommend setting this up.
The Enemy Forces mobs are actually showcased on the map that you can open at any time with “M”.
Buffs & Debuffs
Buffs and Debuffs in Fellowship are extremely important, but unfortunately the base UI doesn’t place the display of these in a great location. As a result, I’d recommend moving them closer to the middle of your screen using the “EDIT HUD” feature in the game menu.
UI Import
Here is my UI import from the Image shown if you just want to pick up and play:
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