Purchasing items that apply a burn effect in LoL is essential for many champions in League of Legends.
Take Malzahar, for example. He can’t be played with any mythic item other than Liandry’s Anguish. His kit is designed around slowly draining your opponent’s HP, and Liandry’s Anguish helps with that.
But if you’re playing a champion like Malzahar, then you probably want to buy all LoL items that burn to power up, right? Well, the good news is that their effects stacks.
The DoT, or damage-over-time, items deal damage by burning your opponent’s HP each second after you’ve hit them with a basic attack, ability, or stood near them.
The burn effect doesn’t have any cooldown and can be reapplied at any time.
That’s how the burn items work in a nutshell. But now, let’s take a look at every individual burn/DoT item in League of Legends and see what makes it good.
The 5 Best Items that Apply Burn Effects
5. Corrupting Potion
The first item we have to talk about here is Corrupting Potion. This is a starting item in League of Legends that costs 500 gold and can be purchased by any champion in the game.
Corrupting Potion has 3 charges that refill each time you visit your base. And when you consume a charge, you regenerate your health and mana for 12 seconds.
During these 12 seconds of regenerating, Corrupting Potion also makes your auto-attacks and abilities apply a burn effect on the enemy champions.
This burn effect deals 15 bonus magic damage over 3 seconds, or 20 if you can’t regenerate mana.
Because of this, Corrupting Potion is the best dueling item in the first 5 minutes of the game. But keep in mind that you can only apply the burn effect on enemy champions and not minions or monsters.
Read Also: Top 5 Best Champions with DoTs
4. Demonic Embrace
The second item in this list is Demonic Embrace. Unlike Corrupting Potion, Demonic Embrace makes all of your damage abilities apply a DoT without requiring a charge or a cooldown.
Demonic Embrace does different amounts of damage depending on whether the enemy is ranged, melee, and their current maximum HP.
Against ranged champion, Demonic Embrace deals 4.8% of their maximum HP as magic damage over 4 seconds. And against melee, the burn deals 8% of the target’s max HP.
Keep in mind that these percentages indicate the total amount of damage the burn will do.
This means that if you hit a ranged champion, your burn will do a total of 4.8% of their max HP over 4 seconds, not 4.8% each second.
Read Also: 3 Reasons Why Malzahar is Good For Climbing
3. Liandry’s Anguish
Liandry’s Anguish is the go-to mythic item for any AP champion in League of Legends that depends on burning effects. The champions that this item the most are Malzahar, Karthus, Cassiopeia, Brand, and Teemo.
Liandry’s Anguish deals 60 magic damage over 4 seconds, plus 6% of your AP and 4% of the target’s maximum health.
However, you’ll also take anywhere from 0% to 12% of your target’s bonus health. This means that Liandry’s Anguish deals more damage against tank champions.
Here’s how much damage Liandry’s Anguish will do depending on the target’s bonus health:
| Target’s bonus health | 0 | 125 | 250 | 375 | 500 | 620 | 750 | 875 | 1000 | 1125 | 1250 |
| Percentage bonus damage | 0% | 1.2% | 2.4% | 3.6% | 4.8% | 6% | 7.2% | 8.4% | 9.6% | 10.8% | 12% |
2. Death’s Dance
Not many players think of Death’s Dance as a burn item in LoL, but it is. The item itself has undergone several changes and reworks, and now it’s difficult to understand. But here’s how it works.
Death’s Dance allows melee champions to take 35% of the incoming physical damage over 3 seconds, rather than all at once (ranged champions only 15%). However, the physical damage is converted into true damage.
So instead of taking a burst of physical damage, you’ll take true damage slowly over 3 seconds instead.
Now, Death’s Dance also deals a third of the stored damage back to your attacker. So the more physical damage they do, the stronger your burn against them will be.
Read Also: Abilities That Can Damage Turrets
1. Sunfire Aegis
Sunfire Aegis is another item that you build with Bami’s Cinders. And because of that, it also has the Immolate passive.
To activate the burn effect from Sunfire Aegis, you need to deal or take damage. This lasts 3 seconds, and it does 15 base magic damage plus 1.75% of your bonus health.
However, damaging an enemy champion after this grants you stacks of Immolate that further increase the burn damage. Each stack increases the damage by 10%, and you can get up to 6 stacks.
If you manage to get 6 Immolate stacks on Sunfire Aegis, the item will also cause your auto-attacks to burn around you, dealing the current Immolate damage for 3 seconds.
And this makes Sunfire Aegis the best among the LoL items that burn your enemies!
Read Also: Items That Give Tenacity
Conclusion
As you can see, the DoT/burn items aren’t the most common ones in League of Legends. Riot Games have admitted that they have trouble balancing Liandry’s Anguish and Sunfire Aegis.
These items either do too much damage and drain everyone or deal way too little damage, and no one is interested in buying them.
However, I’ll say that burn items are interesting additions to the game and can make many champions much more interesting to play.
One of the most popular fantasies in gaming overall is a mage that slowly damages his enemies over time. So, we definitely need more items in LoL that apply burn effects!
