Arena Yemoja - Misunderstood Mage in a Misfit Mode

Hello! I made this guide on Yemoja as I find her a truly interesting character, and I feel her Omi mechanic may not be fully explored by players. Yemoja is, as Conquest players know, a high skill cap character. By no means do I believe I know everything about Yemoja, I still struggle knowing when to use her 1, but I seek to show new ways about thinking about her, in terms of gameplay, skills and builds that you can refine or even reject and ultimately understand this wonderful character better.

I chose Arena in particular because Yemoja is, in my opinion, a character that plays very differently in Conquest and in Arena, which leads to a lot of mistakes playing her because you just cannot emulate her Conq playstyle and get results in Arena, as I'll try to show below and as of time of writing there is no Arena Yemoja guide yet on Smitefire.

I will assume you know what her skills do in the guide. If you do not, read her skill descriptions, or better yet, try her in Jungle Practice for a bit to get more familiar with her skills.

Essentially a pros/cons section, but it must be acknowledged that characters are better or worse in different situations. As a result, this is both a guide on when to pick her in the picking phase and a summation of her pros and cons.

Yemoja when:
- You want to play a healer/enchanter that somewhat rarely intentionally interacts with the enemy.
- You like getting kills when you really shouldn’t be able to.
- You want to play a low skill floor, high skill cap character that can make big plays when mastered.
- Your team isn’t really lacking in any particular area like damage or tanking.
- You like playing Yemoja!

Don’t Yemoja when:
- Your team has too many healing or high self-sustain gods already.
- You don’t like relying on your team.
- You want to play top tier characters.

Yemoja’s defining mechanic. It demands further exploration, so let’s see exactly what having this chopped up mana bar does for her:

It gives her an energy system where she can stock up multiple bursts of spell casts provided she gets some downtime in-between. If you’re familiar with it from LOL or HOTS Valeera, you’ll know that most characters with energy systems are better off saving their energy to use it all at once in an important situation (i.e. teamfights) rather than being constantly at 0 Energy/ Omi. Especially in Arena, where winning teamfights are crucial to winning the game, alongside minions, it’s best to make sure you are at maximum effectiveness for each teamfight. This means you need to minimise your Omi use outside of teamfights.

Since all her basic spells require Omi and have no cooldown, this means that if you are at max Omi, you are slowly wasting spell casts by not spending it and getting effectively 0 Omi regen. Therefore, to maximise your effectiveness, you usually want to be looser with your spell casts if you are at max Omi – this usually means using Mending Waters, even if only one person is missing 50 health and nothing is happening. It's also a great opportunity to waste Bouncing Bubble so your 1 becomes Moonstrike.

Omi also means all her spells have opportunity costs with each other. To illustrate this, I’ll give an example. If you’re playing Scylla, using Crush is completely independent of Sentinel. Using Crush does not affect how often you can use Sentinel, unless Scylla has little mana, which is rarely a concern. This is not true for Yemoja. If she has 3 Omi, and chooses to use Riptide, she can no longer use Mending Waters until she gets 3 Omi, and vice versa. This competition between her own spells exists whether she has 3 Omi or 10 Omi. As a result, she must decide which spell will get her the most value for the situation – she cannot just throw her whole kit in a teamfight in the same way as other characters. This is a major factor in her high skill cap.

The basic attack healing mechanic is very weak. The 10% extra healing is nice, but not much. It’s worth noting it has a generous duration of 7s and it doesn’t stack so don’t feel the need to constantly be basic attacking your teammates.

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I’ll tackle her 1 separately. Bouncing Bubble, or Bubble, is her worst spell by far. It comes out slowly, the damage and slow are terrible at long range and can be somewhat easily dodged or missed at close range. The only saving grace of this spell is that if you have an enemy stunned right in front of you it does high damage. This is what provides the damage for Yemoja to do her infamous 100-0 stunlock by spamming 1.

This is also where Conquest and Arena differ. In Conquest, this stunlock is doable early game since whoever she’s doing it on will not have many teammates around to stop Yemoja while she does her combo. Even if she doesn’t actually 100-0, Yemoja will have done significant damage by the end of it as well as given her lane partner time to attack her opponent. In Arena, there is constantly 4 other teammates around your target. You will very easily get CCed or focused and die if you try to do this without a huge distraction, such as River's Rebuke.

Additionally, in Conquest, getting your lane opponent to back because you spammed 1 at their face is valuable for the farm advantage but in Arena it’s not particularly useful for your team if someone eats all your 1s and escapes with a sliver of health since you get no ticket advantage and the person will be back shortly. You can’t even try to force a 4v5 engagement afterward because you spent all your Omi spamming 1 so it’s actually closer to a 4v4 since you aren’t really useful.

Besides the stunlock strat, this spell is also the culprit of what I call the biggest sin of Arena Yemoja, using it for poke at long ranges. Unless you’re at max Omi, this is just a waste of Omi. It does little damage, does not really initiate a teamfight and is easy to dodge. Furthermore, poke and getting people low without killing is not valuable in Arena due to proximity to fountain as mentioned above. Please please please don’t use this or Moonstrike for poke unless you know exactly why you’re doing it.

Oh, you can also clear wave with it. The clear’s not bad, but it doesn’t clear until well into the midgame and if there’s also a teamfight happening you’re using 2 Omi to clear wave rather than help your team. If your team has a clearer that sacrifices less to clear (e.g. Anubis, who can use Plague of Locusts which he doesn’t really need in teamfights) have them kill the wave instead.

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A significantly better spell than Bubble, this serves as her main Assassin peel and kill securing tool. Unfortunately it’s rather slow. Use it either at close range when your team is getting run over or to secure kills at max range.

Do remember the opportunity cost of this spell. This is 2/3rds of a Mending Waters or Riptide, and this spell lacks the reliability of Mending Waters, it is fairly easy to miss. Ask if a simple Mending Waters will save your team better than a Moonstrike, especially if you’re bad at landing this spell’s stun.

This is almost always the preferred spell for your 1 to be on. i.e. You want your next 1 to be Moonstrike at the start of a teamfight since Bubble is bad and you often need to use Moonstrike as quickly as possible when you need it.

Can be used as wave clear like Bubble but isn’t ideal like Bubble. In fact, it’s even worse because it turns your 1 into Bubble, forcing you to spend 2 Omi to change it back.

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The most reliable spell in your kit. Provides mediocre heals and shields per person but very often hits 5 people in Arena, resulting in high total effective health gain. Furthermore, it's quite hard to miss. In teamfights this is a very powerful spell when spammed and so I highly recommend using this as your bread-and-butter spell.

Since this spell hits your allies, this can be used from very safe ranges. This means Yemoja can still impact a fight even when she’s nowhere near the enemy. This is important if she gets focused in a teamfight and lives. Even if she has little health and needs to back, she can quickly spam this spell on her team from safety to help them win the teamfight before backing herself. She will get the Omi back via the slow walk back to her team so in most cases doing this is preferred.

Bounce Theory: This spell bounces to teammates. It usually bounces to the closest teammate, and it’s range is calculated using whoever it’s currently at as the origin, not the place where Yemoja originally casted it from. Using this, Yemoja can put herself in positions where all her teammates will get the effect of the spell.
For example, let’s say Bacchus flopped in and is fighting their team. Your backliners are roughly 90 units away (Ranged basic attack range is 55) and coming over. If you simply walked with your backliners and used this spell, Bacchus would not get your Mending Waters. If you were with Bacchus, your Mending Waters would not hit your backline. However, if you stood in between Bacchus and your backline, then Mending Waters Bacchus, the waters will hit Bacchus, bounce to you and then your backline. Do consider where you should position to maximise the number of people who get hit by the waters.

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Forward (Blue Targeter): The less useful of the two modes. As an initiation it’s too predictable and suffers from the same problem as Neith Back Flip. It can be used to bring stragglers into teamfights and help chase when the situation calls for it, but it isn’t super useful. As an escape, it’s worth noting that Yemoja can’t drop this at her feet, so if she gets rooted she has no escape. More importantly, if she used Purification Beads, she can’t go through her ring. Way too many times have I died because I forgot about this. Of course, you can use this at fountain to help everyone at fountain get to the fight faster. This is only advised if you are at max Omi, 3 Omi is a lot to save roughly 2 seconds of travel time per person.

Using this on enemies is very interesting, and quite effective at peeling Assassins that move predictably, although I can't help but think Moonstrike does it's job at a 1 Omi discount, with some damage free to boot. Do consider using this spell to peel though.

Reverse (Orange Targeter): One of the hardest skillshots in the game, making it a high-risk high-reward play. Using it to successfully save allies means you traded 3 Omi for net 5 tickets, an amazing deal, but missing means you wasted 3 Omi. The reason why it’s a skillshot is because very often teammates in trouble will get chain CCed to death so you need to land your Riptide right on them. Furthermore, if you’re solo your teammates will often ignore the ring even if they don’t get chain CCed. For a spell that needs to be used the instant someone gets in trouble or they will die, the aim requirement is rather high. Not to mention you will need to be max distance away from the teammate in trouble – if you were 30 units away you wouldn’t be able to use reverse ring.

Certain characters are also soft countered by this spell. Characters who keep your teammates locked down in obvious locations can lead to a relatively less risky save. The most important example is Da Ji. Paolao telegraphs where it will pull via the chains and you have more than enough time to drop a ring where it will pull to so everyone pulled will be safe. If you are fast, Nox combos can be countered by ring.

Using it on enemies isn’t useful often. It just does too little and for kill securing, Moonstrike is better.

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Strong, but situational. Frankly, the Omi regen part is likely the better half of the ultimate, more than the walls. It lasts 8s if you stay in the walls the whole time, leading to 4 extra Omi. That may not sound like much, but on a character with 10 max Omi, that’s 40% of your burst output. As a result, you want to stay in the walls if possible, don’t leave it unless you will die doing so. Feel free to use this ult solely for the Omi regen – it really makes a difference. If you need it, ignore the walls and just use it for regen.

Regarding the walls, here are some ways they can be used, in decreasing order of preference:
- To get the Minotaur into the enemy portal safely.
- To save a teammate by blocking the path to them with the walls.
- To block the enemy fountain.
- To trap an enemy between the walls with some natural terrain (aka the walls in Arena) and spamming 1 to kill them.
- To zone people out of the fight.

Getting the Minotaur into the portal should be done when you can use the enemy's fountain wall to block access to the Minotaur from in front of the Minotaur as well as the sides. If no enemy / 1 person is next to the Minotaur, you can ult and escort the Minotaur safely to portal, a near guaranteed 15 tickets just for ult. Just make sure the Minotaur isn't so low that say one Scylla Crush from across the walls will kill the Minotaur. Remember you can still Mending Waters across your own walls while doing this!

Saving a teammate is best done by putting the walls perpendicular to the direction your teammate is running so they run through the walls. This tends to lead to the best result since projectiles can’t travel through the walls. This is fairly likely to save your teammate, which is a net 5 tickets and even if it doesn’t, chances are the enemy overextended for the kill, giving your team a chance for kills.

Blocking the enemy fountain is the oldest trick in the book, but I don’t really like it. Firstly, you rarely get a kill because it’s difficult to get into position to cover the entire tower area near the fountain with ult. If you use it to try to get a kill, the opponent will just walk to the end of it and wait for the walls to collapse outside the area. Secondly, while delaying the opposing team from entering/exiting teamfights is useful, it doesn’t often give direct ticket advantage like the above use cases. This is still decent – do it if you don’t see a better ult option.

Trapping an enemy and killing is where Yemoja’s stunlock comes into play. This is especially useful at your enemy’s side of the map, as you can easily use your opponent’s fountain walls to block them for a kill. However, do not forget about the using jungle walls or sometimes even the edge of the map to trap people. However, actives can destroy this plan hard. Aegis Amulet negates all your damage, Purification Beads provides the enemy the opportunity to try to run around and dodge your 1 spam, and Phantom Veil or teleports ruin the plan entirely. Furthermore, you often have to use 6+ Omi on your 1 to kill your enemy, which isn’t ideal. The 5 ticket advantage is rather inconsistent so I don't like this type of ult much, however fun it is.

Zoning people out of the fight is exactly what it means. Most “random ults” will fall in this category, preventing the enemy team from taking the positions that they want most. This is usually a weaker version of blocking fountain, but useful nevertheless.

One thing I sometimes see Yemoja players do is use Riptide to prevent enemies from leaving the area. This isn’t necessarily bad, but I want to caution against this, especially using 6 Omi on two Riptides. It is a lot of Omi, and the damage of this ult simply isn’t high enough to warrant it. Please know why you’re doing this and what you are giving up (two Mending Waters) by doing so.

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Mending Waters is your best spell.

Bubble/ Moonstrike is your damage spell and Riptide gets little comparatively from being levelled.

River's Rebuke doesn’t get much from levelling as it rarely gets it’s damage off. Get at 5 and save maxing until 1 and 2 are maxed.

Riptide gets less from being maxed compared to 1 and 2, especially for such a situational spell.

Lotus Crown

Yes, this looks like a mage build. Why? Let’s consider what I’ve said in the skills section. Yemoja mainly uses Mending Waters and occasionally Riptide. Both these spells can be used at long range with little downside, and Yemoja rarely needs to get close to the enemy. Then, why would she go tank? Guardians tend to go tank because they have short range spells that require them to be up close where they tend to take more damage and because of poor scaling. Yemoja doesn’t use these short range spells often. She gets little out of being close, so she should stay near backlines most of the time. Lotus Crown’s protections and Guardian base stats can help her if she does need to go in. And in the backline, she doesn’t take much damage, not to mention she gains effective HP by healing herself midfight, so why should she build tanky? Hence a mage build to maximise healing.

This is not to say building tanky is wrong. If you have a reason why you want to build tanky, go ahead. Just make sure you know why. From where I am though, I feel mage is better way to build her. Also see my tank Yemoja rant in the Miscellous Tips section later.

Core Items:

	Yup, I'm building Specialist’s Blessing. I know I need to explain this so this is here simply because Shoes of Focus + Chronos' Pendant + Lotus Crown gives 290 Mana/MP5, 10 short. To not delay the last Omi too late, Specialist’s Blessing is taken for the 20 MP5. It also nicely gives 10% CDR so we can cap CDR.
	Core. 250 Mana + 10% CDR is too good.
	In Arena, teamfights happen often leading to a lot of strain on your Omi reserves. Hence, 40% CDR is important and Chronos' Pendant is the easiest way to reach it. It even has a passive that gives you a small amount of Omi every 10 seconds, which is nice.
Lotus Crown	Giving 20 Physical and Magical protections is a lot for squishy characters. For reference, using this means a character with 40 protections now takes around 8% less damage with this. Considering Yemoja can have near perfect uptime on this for her whole team, this item is extremely useful.

Situational Items:

Frankly, after Lotus Crown, Yemoja can kind of build whatever she wants and it will probably be useful in some way. There's a lot of discussion on this section in the comments. Do take a look at the comments if you're interested - Branmuffin in particular argues for many items written below. Here are my favorites:

	You heal a lot. This helps you heal more, what’s not to love!
	Further increases your healing, and improves your 1 spam damage significantly.
	Provides somewhat high power and semi-permanent damage. Unfortunately your best way to proc it is via 1, so I would suggest this item more for players wanting to use 1 from time to time, not just using 2 from the backline. The added health is also nice. Best used against tankier comps since it scales with enemy health.
	Useful defensive item that offers a nice aura that increases magical damage for your item. Take if you're worried about magical damage and your team has good magical damage dealers.
	Probably the best magical protection item to take if you're worried about magical damage but your team lacks magical damage dealers that are doing well. It has a nice aura for your team.
	Just a nice, generic defensive item if you need it. Normally Gauntlet of Thebes would be better, but this tends to stack faster than Gauntlet of Thebes, which is important considering how late you will have to build this. Also see Gauntlet's entry in the Overrated section.

Relics are standard. Purification Beads and Aegis Amulet if necessary, Magic Shell and Heavenly Wings to help your team if you don't need Beads or Aegis, and Cursed Ankh against high healing or sustain.

Overrated Items:

These items, in my opinion, aren’t as good as most people think they are. I am not calling them useless, but please think carefully about these items before you buy them.

	Yes, I don't like BoV. The problem with this item is it’s poor synergy with Lotus Crown. Lotus Crown provides 80 Physical Protection with it’s passive up already. Very often the diminishing efficiency from the extra 65 Physical Protection will not be worth it. Furthermore, the two together leads to a build with 0 health and little Magical Protection so it doesn’t even really provide good protection for Yemoja. If you're going more defensive against a heavy physical team, though, consider Shoes of Focus into this into a item that gives health into Lotus Crown.
	I love Gauntlet, but Yemoja just has no space for it. The problem is when do you build it? - If you build it before Chronos' Pendant, you are massively delaying your Omi regen. Yemoja at 10/20% CDR really struggles to get Omi. I personally find it terrible to play. Not to mention you will get your final Omi only after item 4 and a blessing, very late. - Building it before Lotus Crown is better but your final Omi is still delayed, plus the protections come a bit late considering the stacking and you delay Lotus Crown. - Building it after Lotus Crown is just too late. By the time you stack Gauntlet, the game is nearly over. I really can’t fit the item into the build. Sorry, Gauntlet.
	Less common, but I sometimes see it and this item is really bad for Yemoja. She simply can’t use it very well. Mending Waters isn’t supposed to be used for procing Divine Ruin, River's Rebuke rarely does damage, leaving Yemoja with her 1. She doesn’t want to use Moonstrike for procing Divine since it does so much more when well-timed rather than to just proc Divine. This means she generally only wants to proc Divine via Bubble, which isn’t ideal as Bubble tends to be a waste of 2 Omi. If you just want this for stats, buy Spear of Desolation instead. Leave this for your team and buy Pestilence or Cursed Ankh instead.

- Tank Yemoja rant: I just can't make tanky, BoV + Gauntlet Yemoja work. I wasn't expecting to be able to pressure at the frontline like Ymir or anything, but I find her presence is so weak that there's no benefit to being at the frontline, with or without another tank. Moonstrike is just not good enough as your only hard CC. It's essentially a single-target (it's so slow that only one person will be caught in it's AOE most of the time) 1s stun that costs 4 Omi if you need to recast it because you need to waste Omi on Bubble. Basically every other frontline character has a significantly better hard CC. I feel like the enemy can just ignore me and run over my team, like a really bad version of frontline Khepri and Khepri isn't even a good frontline to begin with. Bodyblocking is really situational and not a good replacement for actual hard CC.

I find Mending Waters is still the best way to prevent my team from being run over - in which case I might as well be at the backline anyway and make use of power. It also hurts that by being in front of your team, you make it a lot harder to use reverse Riptide to save your team.

Maybe I'm playing the character wrong - I don't play frontline tanks very often so maybe I'm just much worse at main/off-tank Yemoja than I am using my suggested backline build. Please try this and tell me if you get results with tanky Yemoja, but as of now I will not make a separate build for tank Yemoja because I think it doesn't work.

- It's best to leave the buffs for your team. Red does little since your scaling, while not terrible, aren’t really at Mage level and Purple obviously is not useful. Out of the three, Blue is best but 10% CDR isn’t really that great and someone on your team with mana issues is better off taking it.

- Your early’s rather bad. Not as bad as Thoth or Merlin but close, because your omi regen is super bad and Mending Waters does really little until rank 4. Don’t be too aggressive early if possible.

- Quick Mini-Assault Guide since she plays so similarly in Assault as in Arena: Start Chronos’ Pendant for more Mending Waters. Play more defensively – people will try and kill you, the healer, the first chance they get. It’s not a bad idea to buy more defensive items as a result. Largely, just play her like you would in Arena, except even more healbotty due to healing’s importance in the mode.

Thank you for reading my Arena Yemoja guide. I hope it was as fun for you to read as it was for me making it, and that you have learnt something about Yemoja along the way.

Many thanks to Jordenitos guide: Code Blue: BBCoding for Beginners as well as A Guide to Creating a Guide by nanoyam which were of great help in making this guide.

I know I focused heavily on Mending Waters, because it's really her best ability, especially for beginners to Yemoja, but when you get better as her, do consider the use cases of Moonstrike, Riptide and Bubble. Truly mastering her requires skill in all her spells.

"I must be versatile" - Yemoja

May you be versatile when using this character's wide toolkit.

Oct 10 2020 - Patch 7.10 - Situational Item revamp from Branmuffin's suggestions (see comments) and tank rant in the Miscellaneous section.

Oct 7 2020 - Patch 7.10 - Minor edits for spelling errors and poor expression in some areas. Also changed River's Rebuke uses, in particular lowering preference for trapping enemies - too easily countered by relics and teleports or just accidently leaving a small gap for enemies to run through.

Oct 4 2020 - Patch 7.9 - Guide Published.