Brand Jungle Opinions?
Only had about 5 or 6 games using it but I'm not drawing ANY conclusions on such a small sample size. Here's my experience. I'm a very new Brand so I could be way off.
Ratings and titles will be bolded.
Power Curve What's odd is, when ahead, I didn't feel like I was that strong (15:1 fed). That being said, when I'm not ahead, I still feel pretty good in terms of effectiveness. In teamfights, even if behind I feel useful, so he definitely feels like a mid/end game champion, to me at least.
Early: 5/10 ----- Mid: 8/10 -----** End: 7/10**
Farming Sustain His health doesn't really get hurt that much. It isn't superb or anything, but it never became an issue to be honest. I never thought to myself "Man I like this champion but this health issue is just too much." and I felt that, if I were counterjungled, I'd have sufficient health and CC to react at least decently but that'll be discussed later. In the sustain department, Brand isn't the problem child of health issues. No, his primary issue (In my opinion) is yet to come.
6/10 Slightly Above Average
Farming Speeds Surprisingly, he cleared pretty quickly. His W shreds max health and he has plenty of AoE abilities. Granted it's constrained by a certain issue Brand has, but so long as he can sustain his damage, he blazes through the jungle at respectable speeds. Even with the problem he has, I had no issue staying on par with the farm of the enemy junglers. ~90-100 CS at 20 minutes was not difficult to manage.
8/10 Great
Ganks On paper, this looks good, granted you can land your skillshots. You have high base damages, a potent % maximum health DoT, and a whopping 2 second stun from level one. Now, for a jungler this is solid. Jungle champions WANT one skill that must be maxed first, and two skills that don't need to be maxed to be useful. He has this; maxing W first is sufficient, and his utility (2 sec stun) is unaffected. He has range and solid damage output. This all sounds good. Granted with mobility and due to skillshot reliance it's avoidable, but overall it looks fine. There's one tiny kicker.
7/10 Good
Mana Sustain As alluded to earlier, this is what I found to be the biggest problem. If I spend mana farming the jungle, I'll run dry quickly and cannot gank. One full clear may not even be feasible without careful spell use. For the record, I DID time my spells to make sure every tick of my passive was nearly gone before my next spell hit to maximize its effectiveness and limit mana consumption. It helped, but it's still a problem, make no mistake. If I chose to clear, I rarely had the mana to gank, and vice versa. What's more, I had to take most blue buffs. Even mid/end game the mana problem persists. The scores above are mildly misleading because he can rarely actually manage to use them all without running dry. It is a critical problem that rarely seems to go away and rears its ugly head at the worst of times.
2/10 Abysmal
Objective Control He burned (Lol) objectives pretty quickly with his passive, but with targets with such large health bars, his mana once again becomes a problem. As for towers, his sieging is solid, and he can waveclear very well, making his defense against sieges equally solid. Overall not bad, but again constrained by mana. However, if he gets counterjungled and loses his blue buff, he's in for an extremely rough time. His dueling isn't as high as a lot of meta junglers either, and this is compounded with the fact that he may lack the mana capacity and cooldowns to blow on a potential invader. Vision control can only help so much when you have an abundance of weaknesses to exploit, particularly when the meta junglers can abuse them so well.
4/10 Slightly Below Average
Teamfighting In theory, it should be good. Good base damages and a well-placed W>R should be potent even if he isn't absurdly fed. And, at least in my opinion, it is. Yeah he has mana issues but to be fully honest, when I played carefully, I felt like I could work around it to take advantage of his combos effectively. His mana issue and low mobility lower the score but his base damages and the fact he has massive AoE damage, good range with a high skill ceiling raises it again.
7.5/10 Between Good and Great
Overall Allinall, I think a lot of his shortcomings were from my lack of experience, and I'm kind of enthusiastic to try him some more. He has his share of problems but I am optimistic with this offpick. I like it. I like it enough that I'm curious why he isn't tried more, because I know a lot of others enjoy using offpicks. For now, because I'm looking at such a small sample size, I'm not going to jump the gun and overreach with this one.
5/10 Average
What Do You Think? I'd love advice for handling his problems and manipulating his strengths. Am I off-base with any of these scores? It's highly possible. If so, please correct and explain why I'm wrong. I'm very new to using Brand, but I REALLY enjoy how his style plays.
