@Riot @Meddler What do you think about Thresh?

Thresh is my favorite and most played champion throughout all of the seasons. And my win rate across all games with him is somewhere around 53-54%. From what I recall, since season 4 his changes have mostly been a few nerfs here and there, some small some more impactful, with one buff to his play-making potential with W + Q.

As of right now, he boasts a ~48% win rate with a ~27% pick rate in platinum+ ranked according to http://champion.gg/champion/Thresh

Now those numbers don't really state indefinitely if thresh is strong or weak, but from my experience playing him he definitely feels weaker than before but mostly due to some changes in the last year, and it all revolves around his tankiness.

The first set of changes being back when armor itemization was being adjusted to be weaker in the items themselves but then champions deemed to be tanks or defense builders received buffs to either base or scaling armor, except thresh who received a hefty increase in health per level, since having lower armor is supposed to be his weakness. BUT with the overall increase in base AD to marksman in return for lower AD/level, his early game was hit a little bit (not too noticeable).

Another change was to overall marksman/assassin itemization. And this is in two separate parts. One being the increase in items with access to flat armor penetration, meaning that when playing against champions who build those, you need to be actively going for more armor and souls to make up for your lack of base armor, which discourages roaming plays since you will miss souls (and roaming plays is supposed to be something thresh is strong at). As well as a bit of a feast or famine situation, where if you don't get enough souls in time to meet the stat check the Flat armor pen users will bring, you will die and simply lack armor even further. The other change being to last whisper, making it affect only bonus armor but in a greater percentage. Well, this hurts thresh more than you would think , seeing as his only base armor is a measly 16, any other he gets being bonus. This doesn't affect him in all scenarios however, because you won't see an ADC or Assassin build a last whisper item just to kill thresh, but it does make him less desire-able in a heavy engage/tank composition where enemies will be more likely to build last whisper, simply because you know that will screw you over.

Still, these are only minor cases or soft hits to him, nothing to make him far too weak to call for a significant buff. But there are one of 3 things that I think would be reasonable changes that won't will help him just enough.

1. Dark Passage: New effect: When an ally takes the lantern or the lantern disappears (times out or thresh moves out of range), any souls close to the lantern will be taken in just before going away. Context - this would be a very small buff that only affects a few cases, such as ally doing a jungle camp and you throw the lantern to pull them away, but then them taking it the moment the camp dies will make you miss those 2-3 souls compared to if they waited an extra second or two. As well as having the lantern to pull the enemy from a dive, they kill an enemy and take the lantern, but then you lose that potential soul. At most I could see this giving Thresh maybe 10 more souls in a 30 minute game.

2. Dark Passage: Ability Power Ratio: 0.4 0.6 Context - Unless if he's going full AP, I don't think this would affect his shield strength that much seeing as how most games he'll have maybe 70-80 AP late game, so this will be a small late game scaling buff to his shield strength by an amount of 15-20.

3. Flay: Slow amount: 20/25/30/35/40% 30% at all ranks. Slow duration: 1 second 1.00/1.25/1.50/1.75/2.00 seconds. Context - Overall buff to his net slow amount on the ability, but would be more useful in use for Thresh due to a longer slow amount rather than a stronger one will make it easier to land Q, place R, or give the ability enough meaning when leveling up that it could prove to be better than Dark Passage when maxing second (btw to you new Thresh players, stop maxing E second, having a stronger and more available W is MUCH better than a bit higher damage and slow amount on your E) in certain scenarios.

Thank you to anyone who reads this, please comment below if you have anything you'd like to discuss! Would love to get a Rioter's opinion on this!