On my first account, like 2 or 3 years ago, I loved the Helena and it was on of my best "stats" ship (60,2% WR and 1400+ avg PR) while I'm not at that level overall (far from it).
On my second account, I just tried it....and wow...I can't play it. Unless you know each islands on each map where you can hide and shoot it's very complicated.
The "all BBs" game we have know is really hard, with 14km range you won't have a lot of targets to shoot at, and it will take only a few salvos of BBs (whatever their tier; whatever their angle) to delete you.
We see many italian BBs too, and each AP salvo hurts like hell.
I generally try to help my DD delete the other DD at the start....and then let's pray and kite :)
Well, I was so happy to try again the Helena...I'm so disappointed. Unless you have 14pt commander (which I don't have yet), you can almost only count on fires on BBs. And IHFE halves you fire chances...
Thinking about leaving it for a while...and grinding something else.
Thank BTW garrus for the map positionning tips...that's exactly what I was looking for. Does it exist for all maps? Otherwise I'm surprised someone never did...