State of Brand

I'd like to start a conversation about Brands current state in the game. From what I can tell, Brand doesn't see much play and I started to think about why that was, given that his combo style gameplay is actually pretty fun. For the most part I'm only considering Brand in the mid lane, so as to be compared to other mid lane mages.

One thing that's really important for a mid lane mage is the ability to farm well and relatively easily (think annie, ryze, anivia, swain, orianna, syndra, viktor, ahri, ect...). All of these mages can clear a minion wave quickly using spells which both have low cdr and also relatively low mana costs, and most of all they have a high enough base damage to do the task. So Anivia might have high mana costs, but her base damage and scaling on each spell is so strong that you can only build mana items and you will do good damage. This is not the case with Brand though. Brand cannot clear a full minion wave, even with a full rotation of his base three spells, as the melee minions are too tanky, even if he builds full AP, this is because each of his spells have pretty low base damage.

Brand has low base damage on his spells because his passive is potentially pretty powerful once at mid/late game. The problem is that Brands passive has no effect on helping his farming abilities, which requires him to use more mana to clear minion waves, on spell rotations which are pretty high for the amount of damage each one does individually.

The next issue which Brand has, compared to most other solid mid lane mages, is that his spell animations are too slow. Most players can see Brands stun animation very easily, which wouldn't be such an issue if the Q width was the same as say a Morgana binding. But instead it's about as skinny as a Nidalee spear. This makes his stun way too unreliable, especially considering the target needs to be ablaze first, compared to Ahri charm, Xerath stun, Anivia stun, Swain snare, ect... And for a stun which is so conditional, it only lasts for 1.5 seconds, the same or less than other stuns for comparable champions.

I think the issue is that people are scared to support Brand buffs because they have seen the power of his passive score him a Pentakill from time to time, but those circumstances are rare and can't be relied upon regularly. So then what would help brand the most while keeping the changes as simple as possible?

I think if his passive was changed to trigger on minions as well, to help his farming abilities, that would help Brand keep up with other comparable mid lane mages. Additionally, while I think that his stun length is okay, I think that the width of Brands Q should be expanded to be as wide as a Morgana binding. This would really help the reliability of hitting his combo against mobile enemies, and give him some payoff for having conditional CC.

Overall, I really like Brands gameplay and I think that he's good in teamfights, however I think tweaking a these few changes could bring him back to being at least competitve against most other mid lane mages.