When is Deathfire Touch better than Thunderlord's Decree?
My friends are telling me that Thunderlord's is basically the best keystone for all damage-dealing roles at the moment. Are there any ADCs that benefit more from Deathfire or Warlords?
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DFT is better if you're playing a DoT champ, imo. It still has great synergy there. If not, thunderlord's is probably better.
Not ADCs, but some casters with DoTs or sustain damage would use DFT better
Mordekaiser can use DFT fairly well, as can Karthus and DoT mages.
If your champion has in-built crit or crit scaling in their kit (Yasuo, Tryndamere, etc.), Warlord's is the way to go.
If your champion is an AD caster (Lucian, Ezreal, etc.), go Fervor. Fervor increases your AD throughout the battle, so your autos and spells that scale off AD will ramp up in damage.
DFT is better on DoT-based champions. Thunderlord's is the strongest for any situation because the damage is absolutely ridiculous. I have yet to experience Warlords being useful on anyone besides Yasuo and Trynd. Thunderlord's is simply better on every champion in every situation.
Basically always
Unless your champion doesn't deal damage with abilities, DFT is better.
- your friends dont know shit about the game, try finding your own answers
- the best mastery for auto attack based champions is fervor of battle
- the best keystone doesnt automatically mean its the best to take. it could be that a keystone is super good but the tree leading towards this keystone isnt so beneficial. for example, thunderlords decree is only a mediocre keystone but its easy to use and the cunning tree is extremely strong (at least it was in 5.23, i didnt play 5.24 yet).
Deathfire is only really good if you have long lasting dots, not sure about that on ADCs.
If your build is Crit based, Warlords is always better.
If you don't build straight Crit (eg BoRK), then Fervor is better for adc than Thunderlord, because the dps is higher than the lightning every 20 seconds.
Since DFT works off of spells and not attacks, it will be bad for ADCs (baring Corki with his rocket poke).
In general, DFT is intended when you have poke; TLD is intended for when you want to trade in bursts.
For mages, DFT is actually as good or better than TLD very early according to my math. For level 1, it just takes 4 seconds of DFT ticking to break even with a single TLD proc. It goes out to 8-12 seconds over the first couple levels, then it gets tricky to fully determine, since it depends on how much AP/AD you are getting.
Late game with 500+AP it takes 8 seconds of ticks per TLD proc to break even. Even at level 14-15, 325 AP is enough to break even at 10 seconds. So, some of it depends on your skill set (DOTs, low cooldown poke spells) and some of it depends on the flow of the engagements (do you have time to poke, or only a quick 3 hit combo every 20 or more seconds). This gets a bit better next patch, by around 2 seconds of DFT per TLD proc for late game.
Also, this math doesn't try to account for how reliably you can hit multiple people with the TLD proc vs how reliably you can hit multiple people with poke.
You didn't ask, but Fervor of Battle on an ADC also is only so-so compared to TLD on ADCs. It will get better next patch, but it still takes several attacks to break even. Runaan's Hurricane is worth a mention here for letting you stack and apply stacks much faster. Comparing Warlord's Bloodlust is more difficult math-wise.
The general consensus that im aware of at the moment is that Thunderlords is the best Keystone at the moment because its damage in the early/mid game is so high that it will make winning lane a hell of a lot easier and winning lane makes it MUCH easier to find yourself winning the game.
Deathfire Touch is only good on DoT based champions such as 
and 
because every tick of their dots procs DFT, resulting in pretty huge damage.
Warlords Bloodlust is great on any champion that goes for 100% crit, mainly 
and 
, but can also be useful on ADCs since they naturally get a lot of crit in their builds now.
Fervor of Battle can be a solid choice for additional damage on an auto-attack reliant champion, including "AD caster" style champions such as 
, because of how stacks are acquired.
It should be noted however that in most cases both Warlords Bloodlust and Fervor of Battle are inferior to Thunderlords decree until the late game (or you get super fed) since their power is very item dependent (crit for Warlords and attack speed for Fervor), while Thunderlords damage is useful at all stages of the game.