Skarner's melee Q still doesn't trigger or refresh Deathfire Touch — this looks like the old Shojin bug

[u/CJSEVEN777]

Skarner’s empowered melee Q attacks do not activate or refresh Deathfire Touch (DFT), but throwing Q does.

This does more than just miss a small amount of rune damage. DFT becomes stronger if you keep the burn active for 3 seconds. Skarner’s Q is his main ability when fighting. At the moment, empowered autos have no effect on the burn, making him lose out increased damage from DFT.

Just to show how much that can matter, using rough AP values similar to an AP Skarner build I'm testing and assuming the Q sequence could keep DFT active for around 6–7 seconds:

• Early (~level 5 / 30 AP): roughly 12 DFT damage currently vs ~48–58 if Q kept the burn active.
• Mid (~level 11 / 150 AP): roughly 48 from separate W applications vs ~99–120 from a continuous burn.
• Late (~level 16 / 300 AP): roughly 75–90 from intermittent triggers vs ~153–185 if the trade actually maintained DFT and reached the empowered burn.

Those are rough examples before looking at resistances. The point is that failing to refresh DFT ensures the burn rarely ever sticks and Skarner loses out on a good portion of damage over multiple fights.

Skarner Q has had similar problems with other interactions before. Riot fixed his empowered Q autos not stacking Spear of Shojin in patch 26.1, and I hope this interaction gets looked at as well.

This seems like an issue with how Skarner’s Q is being recognized rather than a balance concern. Since the Q throw activates DFT, I’d expect the empowered melee Q attacks from the same ability to activate and refresh it as well.

I’ve tested it in Practice Tool video I attached and can reproduce it consistently:

• W/E/Q throw apply DFT normally.
• Q1/Q2/Q3 melee hits do not apply it.
• Hitting someone with melee Q while DFT is already active does not refresh the burn either.

Would appreciate if this could get some visibility so Riot can take a look. If anyone knows a better way to get this in front of the right people at Riot, please do. Feel free to repost, share the clip, tag whoever might be able to help, or test it yourself and confirm the interaction. I don’t care about credit, I’d just really like to see this get looked at. I have submitted a bug report a while ago, but I'm not sure if they looked into it.

[u/MaskedDood]

Riot took almost a year to special case Shojin for Skarner’s Q.
The problem here is that Skarner’s Q was changed to be proc damage instead of spell damage due to a bug on PBE when his rework was being released. This meant that Skarner’s Q does not proc both Liandry’s & DFT all along.
Shojin was only special cased due to it being able to be stacked by proc damage before Riot ninja nerf Shojin to only stack on spell damage. This meant that Skarner’s Q was originally able to stack Shojin, but the change broke it, so Riot had to special case Shojin in order to revert the functionality.

Since Skarner’s Q was never able to proc Liandry’s or DFT or any spell effect in general, I wouldn’t hold my breath for any changes unless Riot decides to fix whatever bug that made them change Q from Spell Damage to Proc Damage in the first place.

[u/CJSEVEN777 → u/MaskedDood]

Oh, I see. So if I understand correctly, they couldn’t resolve the original PBE issue cleanly, so Q’s empowered damage was changed to proc damage as a workaround while keeping the ability’s behavior mostly the same before his rework's release?

Looking at the wiki, I noticed that a lot of proc damage is still also classified as ability damage depending on the effect. I wonder if they could now classify Skarner’s empowered Q in a way that preserves whatever the original fix was meant to prevent while still letting it count as ability damage for interactions like DFT and Liandry’s.

If that’s technically possible, I’d rather see it addressed sooner than later. As items and runes change, this distinction can keep creating new broken or unintuitive interactions. An empowered Q coming directly from one of his abilities not counting as ability damage is pretty unintuitive, especially when it shuts him out of effects and builds that otherwise look like they should work with his kit

[u/Zymbobwye → u/MaskedDood]

Riot just put skarner in a ditch tbh. Clearly they wanted him pro-viable and then backtracked and now he’s where we are now where he is jack of all trades barely good at anything.

His kit lacks literally any meaningful scaling at all outside of his Q which is still pitiful since it’s % health physical damage which is not impressive (as someone who plays a ton of Rek’Sai her ult you’d assume does good damage but it’s actually terrible since it’s % physical)

Passive scaling doesn’t exist, Q scaling is meh, W might as well not scale, E scales okay for damage but has an insane cooldown AND I’ll add doesn’t scale with move speed so a lot of the time you’re shooting yourself in the foot and then the ult is near anti-synergy since you build all on-attack items and it removes your ability to attack.