League of Legends Won’t Have a Deathfire Touch Keystone Rune at First

The new League of Legends runes offer plenty of options for almost every gameplay style, but Deathfire Touch is one mastery that’s not making the transition to a rune, at least not in the beginning.

Several of the current Keystone Masteries have been ported into Keystone Runes with slight changes made to make them more interactive, but Deathfire Touch simply doesn’t offer that kind of flexibility. With a straight damage-over-time effect applied to enemies, it’s a solid choice for those with low cooldowns who scrap frequently, but its current iteration doesn’t fit with the direction that the new runes are moving.

Riot Meddler spoke about the mastery in his most recent Gameplay Thoughts post, one that was quite brief since it focused mainly on the fact that the new runes would be landing on the PBE Tuesday for testing. Meddler responded to a reader’s question about DFT and spoke to its lack of gameplay.

“We wouldn’t want to add something exactly like DFT given its proven to be very mandatory on some champs without offering enough gameplay,” Meddler said. Having said that if some of the DoT/sustained spell casting champs that currently use it end up struggling we’d certainly want to get something in that fills its niche, just in a better way.”

Meddler continued in his explanation about the potential for a DFT rune and said that it might be a post-launch rune, perhaps the fourth Keystone Rune to be added to the Sorcery rune path. AP ratios are also being considered for the Press the Attack Keystone Rune that grants stacking damage the longer that players stay in the fray. The rune currently only grants AD and wouldn’t do much good on a mage, but Meddler said that current tests for adding an Adaptive quality to it with AP ratios seems to be promising so far.

Other masteries like Thunderlord’s Decree and Stormraider’s Surge both made the transition to the new runes, but they came with several gameplay changes to make them more interactive while still leaving room for enemies to avoid aside from “just don’t get hit.”

The runes are currently being added to the PBE, so expect very tentative values and names to receive plenty of discussion in coming weeks.