Deathfire Touch vs Comet: Which Keystone Actually Does More Damage

One Arcane Comet hits harder than one Deathfire Touch burn at every stage of the game. Keep a target burning for about seven seconds, though, and the numbers flip the other way.

Sorcery Keystones

Deathfire Touch vs Comet

Patch 26.19

One Arcane Comet hits harder than one Deathfire Touch burn at every stage of the game. Keep a target burning for about seven seconds, though, and the numbers flip the other way.

The complaint doing the rounds this week is that Comet outdamages Deathfire on every champion. Half of that holds up. The other half doesn't. We ran both keystones through their current values at three points in a game, then checked how each one actually performs on Patch 26.19 for the champions players split between them.

What Each Keystone Does Right Now

Arcane Comet

Any ability that damages a champion throws a comet at them. It deals 15 to 100 damage by level, plus 5% AP and 10% bonus AD, and lands 0.825 seconds later. The farther it travels, the harder it hits, up to double damage at 750 units. Cooldown runs from 20 seconds at level 1 down to 8 at level 18.

Deathfire Touch

Ability damage sets the target on fire for 3 to 12 magic damage per second by level, plus 2.5% AP and 7% bonus AD. A burn that stays lit for three seconds does 75% more from then on. It lasts 4 seconds off a single-target spell, 2 off an area spell, and 1 off damage over time. There's no cooldown.

Comet hasn't changed since Riot cut its base damage and added the distance bonus in Patch 26.9. Deathfire arrived in that same patch and has been trimmed three times since: an April hotfix lowered its ratios and the linger bonus, 26.10 cut its base damage, and 26.11 locked it to magic damage. It's an old name, too. Deathfire Touch was a Season 6 keystone mastery, which we once weighed against Thunderlord's Decree.

One Hit Each: Comet Wins Easily

The fair way to compare them is at the AP a mage actually has. We used 120 AP at level 6 (a first back), 350 AP at level 11 (two items) and 600 AP at level 16. (Magic resist cuts both by the same share, so we've left it out.)

Game point	Comet, no distance bonus	Comet from 375 units	Comet from 750+ units	Deathfire, one single-target spell	Deathfire, one area spell
Level 6, 120 AP	46	69	92	41	17
Level 11, 350 AP	82	124	165	81	34
Level 16, 600 AP	120	180	240	123	52

A single Deathfire burn off a single-target spell roughly matches a Comet with no distance bonus. Fire the comet from real range and it does double. Most mage spells are area spells, though, and an area burn only lasts two seconds, so one landed skillshot gives Deathfire somewhere between a fifth and two fifths of what Comet does.

That's the number people see in a lane trade. Poke once, walk back, and Comet has done two to five times the damage. Players who looked at that and called Comet the stronger rune were reading it correctly for that situation.

A Whole Fight: Deathfire Pulls Ahead

Comet then goes on cooldown. Deathfire keeps going for as long as you keep hitting, and three seconds in it jumps to 1.75 times its base rate. Here's what one burn does when it never goes out, against Comet's best case of landing every time from full range. That's generous to Comet, by the way (it lands 0.825 seconds after your spell does, and anyone who keeps moving can walk out of it).

Game point	Comet cooldown	Lit burn per second	Burn kept up 10s	Comet in the same 10s (full range)	Burn needed to beat one comet
Level 6, 120 AP	16.5s	15	132	92	7.4s (5.8s at half range)
Level 11, 350 AP	12.9s	30	260	165	6.8s (5.4s at half range)
Level 16, 600 AP	9.4s	45	396	480 (two comets)	6.6s (5.3s at half range)

The break-even barely moves across the game. Keep someone burning for somewhere between five and seven and a half unbroken seconds and Deathfire has out-damaged a comet. That isn't long. After that it climbs at roughly double Comet's long-run rate: at level 11 a lit burn does 30 damage a second, while a comet landing on cooldown from full range works out to about 13.

Late game is the one spot where Comet catches up inside a ten-second window, because its cooldown drops under ten seconds and two comets fit in. Stretch the fight to fifteen seconds and Deathfire is back in front, 623 to 480.

Then there's the bit no single-target comparison can show. Comet lands on one spot. Deathfire burns every champion your ability damages, so an area spell that clips three people in a teamfight lights three separate burns. Six seconds of that at level 16 comes to about 640 damage spread across the enemy team, where one comet does 240 to one target.

The catch: an area burn goes out after two seconds. To reach the empowered rate you have to hit the same target with something every two seconds (or with a single-target spell every four). A mage who lands one skillshot every eight seconds never gets there.

Who Actually Runs Which

Ranked players have sorted this out already, and they did it by champion. Comet's biggest users are Lux, Xerath, Vel'Koz and Ziggs, who poke from long range with big cooldowns in between. Malphite top runs it too, at 75% of his games. Deathfire belongs to champions who keep damage ticking on a target: Viktor takes it in 91% of mid games, Smolder in 90% of bot games, Senna in 71% as a support. Brand takes it in every role he's played, from 69% of support games up to 86% in bot lane, and it's the top choice for Gangplank and Singed in top lane too.

The real test is the champions who split. Here are all thirteen champion-role pairs with at least a thousand games on each keystone this patch.

Champion	Deathfire games	Deathfire win rate	Comet games	Comet win rate	Gap
Brand Mid	7,882	51.95%	1,248	48.48%	Deathfire +3.5
Rumble Top	8,344	47.28%	3,067	44.57%	Deathfire +2.7
Morgana Support	2,653	52.85%	43,518	50.87%	Deathfire +2.0
Brand Support	23,025	51.27%	4,052	49.46%	Deathfire +1.8
Anivia Mid	1,963	48.70%	1,913	47.62%	Deathfire +1.1
Hwei Bot	1,428	53.50%	3,654	53.26%	Even
Morgana Mid	1,074	50.84%	4,372	50.73%	Even
Aurelion Sol Mid	12,872	50.50%	2,938	50.41%	Even
Malzahar Mid	32,261	51.56%	7,754	51.56%	Even
Hwei Mid	7,492	51.45%	16,103	51.56%	Even
Zyra Support	2,072	50.24%	18,627	51.36%	Comet +1.1
Hwei Support	1,580	49.94%	3,336	51.26%	Comet +1.3
Yorick Top	1,619	47.75%	4,596	49.39%	Comet +1.6

Ranked games, Silver and above, Patch 26.19, across NA, EUW, Korea, Vietnam and Singapore. Gaps in percentage points.

Brand and Rumble are the clearest results on the page. Both win more with Deathfire, by margins their sample sizes support, and both are built around keeping enemies on fire. Rumble's case is the starkest: neither keystone makes him a winning pick right now, but Comet drags him under 45%.

Malzahar is a dead heat to the second decimal across forty thousand games. Hwei mid and Aurelion Sol come out level too. Comet's three leads are all small, and none of them clears the noise you'd expect from a couple of thousand Deathfire games.

So "Comet outdamages Deathfire on every champion" doesn't survive the data. There isn't a single champion where Comet wins by a margin the games can back up, and there are two where Deathfire clearly does.

The Verdict

Comet does more damage per hit, and it wins any trade that's over in under five seconds. Run it on long-range poke champions who land one big spell and back off, and on anyone who can't keep a target burning.

Deathfire does more damage over a fight. Seven and a half seconds of unbroken burn beats even a full-range comet at every stage of the game, and every extra target your spells hit is another burn running. Run it on champions who can keep hitting the same people every couple of seconds, and on anyone whose damage arrives as a steady stream rather than a single spike.

So what if your champion can go either way? Ask which kind of fight you'll be in more often. Picking the keystone that suits that fight decides more than either rune's raw numbers.

More on Runes

• LoL Stat Shards: Adaptive Force, Haste and Which to Pick
• Which Is Stronger Deathfire Touch or Thunderlord's Decree on APs? (2015)

Keystone values from Riot's current client data for Patch 26.19 and the League of Legends Wiki. Perspectives paraphrased from various Reddit threads.