I've never used this but I probably should be? How exactly does it work? Is it only usable on recipes that have an element? Can this be used on whatever? What's the best way to use it?

Thanks. XD I've never used the Brand of Element skill either, since I got all classes to 50+ after HW. Never did endgame crafting in ARR and haven't come across any recipes that have an element to them.

Name buffs the same elemental Brand by an amount dependent on the % lack of progress.
So at 0 progress, or 100% lack of progress, a Brand of <> under Name of <> does 2.5x the progress of a CS2, so about 300% efficiency or a 200% efficiency buff from Name.
This decreases as the lack of progress goes down, so your 2nd Brand will be weaker.

Offhand I do not know how the downward scaling works. An easy way to test it would be to find a recipe that you can get to almost 100% progress, note how much CS2 gives (for reference), and use Name-Brand on the almost complete synth.
My guess is that the buff from Name is 2 * (% progress missing), so with 100% progress missing, your 100% efficiency move does 300%.
With 1% progress missing (for instance), you get a 2% bonus so your 100% move is now 102%. I doubt it'd be a penalty at any point so that is the logical math behind it.

If that is the case, then one could argue that if SH is up, a Name-Brand will be better than a CS2 as long as progress is under 90%... But realistically you'd want to either do Name-Brand (or 2 Brands) at the start of your progress set, maybe under Ing2, OR do GSM's Flawless Synth method, OR Muscle Memory off the bat.
Basically its only really good at the start, and likely not the "best" choice for high difficulty synths, where you'd just fall back on the always reliable CS2.

I will say it is amazing for less difficult stuff where you can just oneshot progress.

The "Name of" skills were added to ensure that every class has a native super-progress ability, and also to grant more utility to the rarely-useful Brand skills. Prior to this, the only options for huge amounts of progress were Rapid Synthesis and Piece-by-Piece, both ARM skills. Now every class except CUL and GSM has Name of plus Brand in order to cover large swaths of progress - and those two get Muscle Memory and Maker's Mark for their own unique large-scale progress tools.

The main problem with Name of skills is that they are uncomfortably expensive. 15 CP for the Name of and 6 CP for each Brand doesn't SOUND like a lot, but given how CP-tight a lot of advanced rotations are, it can be rough.

Originally Posted by LineageRazor

The main problem with Name of skills is that they are uncomfortably expensive. 15 CP for the Name of and 6 CP for each Brand doesn't SOUND like a lot, but given how CP-tight a lot of advanced rotations are, it can be rough.

Depending on what you're making, Name/Brand usually saves you many steps of CS2 so the the CP cost becomes very efficient. I recommend using it for 70 dur synths up to 1*.