Brand pressed R...

Brand is an immobile mage with limited range, long cooldowns, many skillshots, and high mana costs. Generally, poke him down from afar so he can't afford to dump his whole combo on you and invest in boots early so you can dodge his skillshots. Engage when his stun is down and/or he's low on mana.

Don't group so tightly together when you know he has his ult, or in general when playing against Brand.

Buy Merc Treads and/or MR items so you don't get bursted down. Grab an MR spell shard or two.

Dodge his other abilities so you aren't marked when he throws out his ult. It will only bounce to marked enemies beyond the second.

Especially if you don't have any true glass cannon assassins who can delete him, so now your team HAS to converge on him in order to empty his healthbar.

Maybe don't clump together?

The problem with brand is he doesnt really need items to deal the damage that he does, his base damage is simply too high causing him to be way too powerful a pick bot lane.

Ok but serious prediction: damage creep will get to the point that deleting one person becomes trivial, so the obvious escalation will be deleting multiple people. AoE oneshot meta

I actually find a brand ult is less effective than his passive.

But... You notice it, you disperse while backing out or moving in. The strength of a brand ult (which has low base damage) is that in the chaos of a team fight its basically unnoticed.

I wouldn't mind brand if he was going mid but jesus christ something needs to be done about him bot, he does way too much damage while remaining safe, it also makes it a huge cluster fuck botlane while trying to focus on everything + dodging his constant output of abilities

pressed R and since none of my team has hard cc, we just get aced.

He's like a kamikaza pilot, even if you focus and drop him in a teamfight first, his damage is so front loaded yet also long lasting so that he can just blow his load and he pretty much won the teamfight with DoT, burst and slows when he gets crystal scepter.

Ah, yes. Imagine being punished for standing close against an AOE mage. It's almost as bad as being punished for going in close against a bruiser as an ADC. [zombie-brand-clap]

Brand is strong but it's not a Malzahar lvl of only being strong for his ultimate.

I mean a well timed zonyas can mess him up and you know.. not standing together :p