Everyone who's played against Brand in ARAM Mayhem has a story about Phenomenal Evil. The augment really does get out of hand on him, just for a different reason than the one people usually give.
ARAM Mayhem Build
Brand
Patch 26.19Everyone who's played against Brand in ARAM Mayhem has a story about Phenomenal Evil. The augment really does get out of hand on him, just for a different reason than the one people usually give.
How Fast Phenomenal Evil Really Stacks
Phenomenal Evil is a Gold augment that gives you 1 ability power, permanently, every time your abilities damage an enemy champion. It has no cap. Take it as your second augment or later and it starts you at 40 stacks the first time it triggers.
What stops it running away is a pair of limits. It can only trigger once per second across everything you do, and any single cast can only trigger it once every three seconds. So hitting four people with one spell earns one stack, and the fastest anybody can stack it is 60 ability power a minute.
I expected Brand to be breaking that limit somehow. He isn't. His advantage is uptime, because something of his is almost always burning someone in an ARAM fight, and that keeps him pressed up against the once-a-second ceiling for whole teamfights while other mages spend half of every fight waiting on cooldowns.
Infernal Conduit Is the Real Engine
This Prismatic makes his abilities apply a Burn that stacks without limit, and every tick of every Burn you own takes 0.08 seconds off your basic ability cooldowns. Blaze [Passive] counts as a Burn for this. Brand's whole kit is setting multiple people on fire at once, so the refunds arrive from several targets at the same time and his rotation speeds up the longer a fight goes.
Item burns are the exception. Liandry's Torment and Blackfire Torch both put damage over time on everyone you hit, and neither refunds a thing.
Pair either augment with Eureka, a Prismatic that turns a slice of your ability power into ability haste, and the two feed each other: more power, faster casts, more stacks. Shrink Engine is the Gold option in the same spirit, handing out ability haste and movement speed for every takedown.
The Build
Sorcerer's Shoes
Blackfire Torch
Liandry's Torment
Rylai's Crystal Scepter
This is the core the Mayhem stats sites list for him, and it's a damage-over-time build that keeps enemies slowed and burning. The item burns don't feed Infernal Conduit, but they don't need to. Blaze [Passive] and the augment's own Burn do that job.
He needs the help. ARAM's balance adjustments already have Brand dealing 5% less damage, taking 10% more and losing 10 ability haste, so an unaugmented Brand is a squishy mage with a nerf on him. The augments are what turn that around.
The Trap: Ethereal Weapon
Ethereal Weapon makes your abilities apply on-hit effects, and on a champion who hits this many enemies with this many spells it reads like the most broken option on the screen. It only does anything if you own on-hit items, though, and none of the four above have one. Unless you're willing to rebuild him around items like Nashor's Tooth, skip it. It doesn't appear among his best augments on any of the sites that track them.
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