Ethereal Weapon lets your spells carry your on-hit effects, and on the right champion that's the most fun Gold pick in ARAM Mayhem. Kai'Sa used to be one of those champions. Since Patch 26.17 she can't get it at all, and she's got company.
ARAM Mayhem Augments
Ethereal Weapon
Patch 26.19Ethereal Weapon lets your spells carry your on-hit effects, and on the right champion that's the most fun Gold pick in ARAM Mayhem. Kai'Sa used to be one of those champions. Since Patch 26.17 she can't get it at all, and she's got company.
What Ethereal Weapon Does
It's a Gold augment with a one-line tooltip: your abilities apply on-hit effects, once per second on each target. The game files actually store that cooldown as 1.5 seconds, so it may run a little slower than the text says. Nothing about it changes on the 26.20 PBE.
What it does for you depends entirely on what counts as on-hit in your build. Nashor's Tooth, Blade of the Ruined King, Wit's End, Kraken Slayer and Terminus all carry an on-hit effect, so every spell that lands now hits like an auto attack as well. Dusk and Dawn goes one better, since its Spellblade proc applies your on-hit effects a second time. With none of those items, the augment has nothing to copy. That's why it's a trap on a damage-over-time mage like Brand.
Best Champions for Ethereal Weapon
Katarina is the cleanest fit. Her usual Mayhem build is Kraken Slayer, Blade of the Ruined King and Terminus, three on-hit items, and she spends teamfights casting into the middle of the enemy team. Every one of those casts picks up the item damage.
Gwen gets there with Nashor's Tooth and Dusk and Dawn. Ekko and Xin Zhao both open on Dusk and Dawn too (Xin Zhao adds Statikk Shiv, whose chain lightning applies on-hit effects of its own), and they pick Ethereal Weapon ahead of every other Gold augment.
Teemo is the odd one, because he doesn't buy a single on-hit item. He doesn't need to. Toxic Shot [E] is an on-hit poison, so it's already in his kit before the shop opens.
Aurora, Hecarim and Tahm Kench round out the champions who take it near the top of their Gold picks. If you're on anyone outside that group, check your items before you click it.
Why Kai'Sa Can't Roll It
On Patch 26.16, Ethereal Weapon was one of Kai'Sa's most-picked Gold augments, with thousands of tracked games behind it. Since Patch 26.17 the public match trackers haven't logged a single Kai'Sa game with it. That's three patches and well over 15,000 Kai'Sa games on 26.19 alone.
Players don't abandon a favorite overnight. An augment goes from thousands of picks to none when it stops being offered, and 26.17 is the patch where Riot's notes said: "We've also made some adjustments to the Augment pool so champions get a selection of options that better fit their playstyles."
That's the only explanation Riot has given. The notes never listed which champions lost which augments, and 26.18 and 26.19 only repeated that the work was ongoing (the one example Riot named was ability power augments showing up on Vayne). There's also nothing in the game files that ship with the client listing which champion can get which augment, so you can't look it up yourself.
Kai'Sa lost Thread the Needle in the same patch, along with a handful of tank and support augments she'd only ever picked by accident.
The Other 37 Champions Who Lost It
Kai'Sa wasn't singled out. The same 26.17 change took Ethereal Weapon away from 37 more champions, and none of them have a tracked game with it since:
| Group | Champions |
|---|---|
| Marksmen | Akshan, Aphelios, Ashe, Caitlyn, Draven, Graves, Jhin, Jinx, Kalista, Samira, Senna, Sivir, Tristana, Twitch, Varus, Vayne, Yunara, Zeri |
| Everyone else | Bard, Blitzcrank, Camille, Darius, Evelynn, Gangplank, Gnar, Hwei, Jayce, Kayle, LeBlanc, Lux, Ornn, Sett, Talon, Twisted Fate, Yasuo, Yone, Zilean |
Eighteen of them are marksmen. The other nineteen don't share an obvious thread, and Riot hasn't offered one. Bard and Kayle were taking it even more often than Kai'Sa was. Blitzcrank's lightning loop, number seven on our most overpowered combos list in July, can't happen anymore, because he can't be offered the augment that made it work.
Other Pairs Riot Has Blocked
Riot has named some exclusions outright, mostly as bug fixes for augments that were reaching champions or spells they shouldn't. These are the ones in the patch notes since 26.14:
| Augment | No longer offered to | Patch |
|---|---|---|
| Combusting Interest | Smolder | 26.14 |
| Pursuit of Haste | Yasuo's E, Akshan's E | 26.14, 26.15 |
| Pursuit of Power | Akshan's E, Draven's Q, Illaoi's E, Malphite's W | 26.15 |
| Overloaded | Katarina's E, Shaco's E | 26.15 |
| Warding Weapon | Akshan's E | 26.15 |
| Mercy's Strike | Non-supports such as Vladimir | 26.15 |
Some rules are written into the augment itself. Draw Your Sword only goes to ranged champions, and it stops appearing once you've built Runaan's Hurricane.
So Why Does Brand Still Get Infernal Conduit?
Riot's pool changes go after augments that don't suit a champion, and Infernal Conduit suits Brand better than it suits anyone. He's still taking it in thousands of games on 26.19. We covered how the burn loop works in the Brand build. A champion/augment pair that's simply too strong gets a balance change, and Riot hasn't touched this one since 26.16 fixed it dealing more damage than its tooltip said.
Pick data from public ARAM Mayhem match trackers, Patches 26.16 to 26.19.
More ARAM Mayhem
- King Me Augment Explained: How It Works in ARAM Mayhem
- Draw Your Sword ARAM Mayhem: Best Champions and the Kayle Trap
- Brand ARAM Mayhem Build: Phenomenal Evil and the Burn Loop
- Vayne ARAM Mayhem Build: Augments, Items and How to Beat Her
- High Roller ARAM Mayhem: Why the Augment Feels Useless Now
- Top 10 Most Overpowered ARAM Mayhem Combos
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