Top 3 Augment Mistakes
1. Item augments vs. teamwide augments
It’s incredibly important to consider what stage you are in when deciding to take any item or teamwide combat augment.
Items are much more valuable in the early game since you are likely to have just your Headliner and 3 other 1 star units at level 4. Thus, an augment such as Roll The Dice (giving Radiant Thief’s Gloves) is extremely powerful as you are buffing your 2-star unit and can double the value of your entire team. Meanwhile, on 4-2, at level 8 you are buffing only 1 out of 8 units on your team, likely not even your most important unit which will already have items. Unsurprisingly, data reflects every single item augment performing better on 2-1 than 4-2, even including Phreaky Friday which has stronger versions on 3-2 and 4-2!
On the other hand, teamwide augments are much stronger on 4-2. For example, Martyr can only proc 3 times at level 4, healing 3 units, then 2, then 1. At level 8, Martyr can proc 7 times, with the first proc healing 7 units which is singlehandedly already more than the full value of the entire augment in the early game. While Martyr is a more extreme example, this holds true for all team wide augments such as Jeweled Lotus which is great for adding damage to 8 units including a 3 item carry that can’t hold another item, but not so great for adding damage to 4 units compared to items in the early game. Vampirism is an exception as it is balanced around not being offered on Stage 4, and is always a good choice. Likewise unsurprisingly, every single teamwide augment performs better in data at 4-2 than at 2-1.
2. Trait-specific augments
Trait-specific augment data is almost always tied to how well the composition performs. A quick glance at data might trick noobs into taking Ramping Rhythm because it averages a fantastic 4.2 overall. However, the data is carried by Jinx 3, who averages a 3.8 with or without Ramping Rhythm, which is a very average augment for her and much worse than many generic augments such as Combat Caster. Ramping Rhythm without Jinx 3 averages a 5.0! There are some rare exceptions, such as Submit To the Pit which was just buffed this patch and gives almost as much as 6 times as much stats as Tons of Stats to your primary carry, so it’s no surprise that it performs extremely well with vertical Mosher despite the comp not being strong without it.
3. Augments with Silver, Gold, and Prismatic versions
Not all augments with multiple versions scale equally. It’s very important to not have a mindset of “Uplink is good” or “Uplink is bad”. Silver Uplink is very strong giving 2 mana per second, but Prismatic Uplink is weak only giving 3.5 mana per second, less than double the amount of Silver Uplink which is undesirable since most Prismatic Augments are worth more than double. For example, Prismatic Harmacist is 25% Omnivamp while Silver Harmacist is 10% Omnivamp.
Prismatic Harmacist gives an exactly equal effect to Silver + Gold Harmacist. Likewise, Prismatic Bulk is exactly equal to Silver + Gold Bulk. However, Prismatic Buried Treasures gives 6 components while Silver + Gold gives 5. This is reflected in data where Prismatic Buried Treasures is the best performing of all 3 on 2-1. Note that it performs worse on 3-2 than on 2-1, which is expected as explained in the first point about item augments.
For another example, Silver Spoils of War gives 25% loot drop chance while Prismatic is only 40%, which is also uncharacteristically less than double that of the Silver version. Furthermore, Spoils shines when you are able to win rounds, which is much easier to do when playing without a Silver combat augment compared to without a Prismatic combat augment- you are very likely killing 0 units if you face a Headliner Olaf with Radiant Thief’s Gloves for example. This is also reflected in data where Silver Spoils performs the best of the 3.
If you have any questions, I will answer them in the discussion thread for this article in the TFT Coaching Discord!