Hel-o There

So I've recently gotten into Smite, tried out their reddit thing and I personally hate Reddit. Like loathe it, so I was excited when I saw this wonderous forum attached to MOBAFire which was attached to Smitefire. I didn't even know Smitefire existed! Yaaaayyyy!!!!

I recently acquired Hel, and I enjoy her but I'm noticing something unusual in that she doesn't seem overtly popular. Tiermonster lists her as the 38th most popular champion(Out of 40), and her win lose ratio isn't really astounding(More saddening compared to Chang'e).

Is this because she's simply bad or due to her complex, weird nature? Or the lack of obvious cleavage....that's probably it.

It's because she is broken. Not OP but just broken.

She was really OP, I remember when we could ban gods in the normal conquest, she was always banned. But now, I think she deserves a buff. (and she will be rework, yay! :D)

Her rework is going to break my heart; I love her current kit.

You mean you love her current OP?

broken but not OP.

Let's hope they don't change her abilities, but I think that they will. :c

they will probably make her more like tyr in terms of one of her first 3 abilities being stance change and a new ultimate

Hel is rarely used for a few reasons. The most obvious one is the fact that she took a huge nerf back in January that she never recovered from, which was having her skills incur cooldowns in the opposite stance. This meant that any time you used her offensive skills in the Dark Stance, you would be unable to use your support skills in the Light Stance for a bit. Stacking cooldown reduction is pretty much required now just to be able to make a difference in teamfights.

Speaking of cooldown reductions, the fact that they're required on her now really limits her build options. You need to build two cooldown items, usually Shoes of Focus and Chronos' Pendant. This really leaves you with only four item slots to customize, and no matter which item route you choose, it's plagued with downsides. Going full magical power just so that your healing is actually making a difference lategame makes you ridiculously squishy. Going tanky makes you too weak. Going both ways makes you fail spectacularly at anything you do.

The other reason for Hel's decline is because the new meta is not kind to her design. She has no escape moves, is incredibly frail, and her best minion-clearing skill, Repulse, requires her to get close to the wave. That's basically jungler food right there. She has to be incredibly wary of incoming ganks, and with jungling being a viable option in Conquest now, she's in constant danger of getting picked off whenever she's trying to push a lane.

In the end, she's a support mage that has too many risks involved, but doesn't reward enough compared to others like Eset or Change'e to be worth picking.

I agree with everything that Sunfall has said. Hel is very good in Assault, but in other modes she does not have a niche. Her inability to be both survivable and high-healing really hurts her; she's basically worth a single 300-400 heal per teamfight, and then she's either dead, or her team is. Her only damaging spell is rather underwhelming, considering it is literally ALL HER DAMAGE.

Finally, her Inspire(?) is very hard to master - immunity to any kind of CC for a short period that only very experienced players can use. You can provide immunity to a Neith Ult, Change Ult, Mesmerize, Trap...the possibilities are endless. It's just so hard to be preventive in this game, when everything happens very quickly, and it's very easily possible to be instant killed. Additionally, if you time your inspire wrong, the enemy team just waits for the buff to end, and use all they have afterwards.

All in all, her worth is as such: High heals for a brief period before her lack of defensives make her become focused and instantly killed, or high survivability to the point where she's ignored, her heals are negligible, and her team dies. She needs some form of CC, imo, as all supports currently do, or she's going to remain at the bottom of the popularity list.