Show comment link function based on node comment settings and not user privilege
If you look at https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules%21node%21node.tpl.php/7.x

and click View source



and scroll down a bit, you will see that there is a variable that you can use:


  $comment: State of comment settings for the node.


So my guess would be that the value is either 1 (TRUE) or 0 (FALSE).

Using Devel module you can use Devel's dpm() function, so put:

dpm($comment); 


to dump and see it's value. 

If my guess is correct, then you would need to do something like this:

 if ($comment == 1) {
    print '&lt;a href="#"&gt;Comment&lt;/a&gt;';
 }