Quests are stupid and Thresh is suffering

Hi,

My name is LiL Bunnie FuFuu, substitute support for L9 and I'm here to do what everyone does on the Boards - complain about everything. Haha not really

I'm a Threshmain (~1,000+ games on him) and play a lot of support or top when I feel like trolling. In the last few patches Thresh's winrate has taken a bit of a beating, going from a consistent 48-49% to hovering at around 46.5% even though he hasn't received any direct nerfs (winrates linked below).

https://i.imgur.com/3jxOEE6.png https://i.imgur.com/8RelwWy.png

There are a number of reasons for this:

Runes Reforged

Runes Reforged has, in my opinion, limited the options for a lot of champions and particularly for Thresh. None of the runes really work on him. Grasp is troll, Guardian only procs with lantern and its very situational, and Aftershock is good but it is the only primary that is. You could say that Spellbook is good but I don't like it as much after the rework. Ignite, teleport, and exhaust can all work but it's annoying to wait 5+ minutes to get your original summoner back and sometimes detrimental depending on what you can/can't do

You're also forced to take Resolve or pair some other keystone with Resolve. Of course you should do this because the tools the Resolve tree runes work best with you (generally speaking) but also because Thresh is_ very_ squishy for a support and you need the base health stats so you don't instantly die in a lvl 2 all in - even with Aftershock - or get poked out of lane (depending on the lane). Before runes reforged you could at least be more creative with your pairing and actually start out with much higher base health because you could opt for more starting hp versus scaling (as it is now).

note: I am not suggesting Aftershock should be buffed. It's already stupid on tanky supports such as Alistar or Leona. But we need more options

HP Nerf & Celestial Body _(goes with Runes Reforged) _

Recently all the resolve tree runes saw a massive nerf to early game hp. Instead of getting say, 145 bonus starting hp if you paired Inspiration primary with Resolve secondary, now you get 35 starting hp and a slightly larger scaling value over time. This indirect nerf has been very hard on Thresh because you're far squishier in the early game than late to begin with, who cares about an extra 175 bonus hp 40 minutes in. It's the -110 hp at 5 min that's the problem. Thresh is a high risk, high reward champion. When you increase the risk so much that you can get blown up by a spellthiefs Brand lvl 2 even if you start chrysalis, relic, and full hp runes that hurts the winrate. Now you're losing more engages and more trades, even if you're landing your skillshots.

I'd also like to mention Celestial Body. It's probably good it was removed since Alistar having 900 health lvl 2 or Thresh having 810 is a little bit absurd. But this change paired with everything else mentioned here has only made it harder to peel and make the plays Thresh was designed to make.

Itemization

Most support items are pretty good on Thresh but some key items have been nerfed, hurting his kit. Particularly the starting items.

• All the starting items: relic, coin, and spellthiefs suck (to varying degrees).
• Knight's Vow - very mediocre ever since the healing and damage redirection was halved on ranged champions.
• Locket of the Iron Solari - Thresh, being one of the squishiest supports, gets a lot less benefit from the shield than pre nerf. You can't build this until lategame to make the shield worth sacrificing early health.

Relic Shield & its Quest

This is the main part of this post because it's the biggest issue and makes this post about a greater issue than Thresh's poor winrate. But to start, yes the item is terrible on Thresh. It's very difficult to complete the quest in anything approaching a timely manner - even with Minion Dematerializer it can still take 12-15 minutes (assuming you miss no siege minions) and without about 15-20 minutes. Thresh has a particularly bad time because he doesn't get the execute, being ranged, and the healing is halved. This forces you to spend a lot of time last hitting minions (and you will miss some because Thresh's flay passive isn't as good as the execute) in lane to complete the quest, and if you don't complete it by midgame it puts your team at a disadvantage. How? Suppose you have 490/500 gold on your quest at 14 minutes - you can spend the next 4-5 minutes trying to last hit one stupid minion so you can unlock all those wards and that isn't as easy as it sounds. By midgame your team's waveclear is pretty good, lasthitting even one minion can be a challenge.

And that ignores the greater point, that being why on earth are supports (let alone Thresh) being forced to spend all this time last hitting minions to complete some stupid quest to get vision - when vision is one of the biggest functions of support? Sure you can stack control wards but you can only have 1 of those on the map at a time. Lack of vision makes you more susceptible to ganks, denies you any objective control (unless you're way ahead, then it doesn't matter), and makes it harder to pull off plays.

You would think that, in a meta which is dependent on who can blow up the enemy faster, that being able to have vision of the enemy at all points in the game would be a good thing.

I'm not going to make any suggestions one way or the other but I liked things a lot better before quests were added. It just makes no sense to me that you should have to do some menial task for vision (with coin & spellthiefs you just have to be in lane) after x minutes. I mean, it used to be that if you consistenty outplayed your opponent in lane and got a lot of kills/assists/objectives that you could go back and get a sightstone. Now you could be 0-0-4 with a 4-0-0 adc at 10 minutes and still not have vision outside of a control ward because "you didn't last hit enough cannon minions!".

Bringing this back to Thresh... OK relic is terrible. What else is there?

Ancient Coin

Riot had to nerf relic shield just to stop ADCs from abusing it. In the process that's made the item borderline useless for Thresh, outside of the +50 earlygame hp (which makes you slightly tankier than your ADC lvl 1-3). Because of that a lot of Threshmains have switched to coin. It seems viable on the surface - quest takes about 10 minutes and you don't have to do anything to complete it, plus you get some CDR - but that isn't great either.
Why?

• Thresh's base hp is 560.

• Suppose you take

https://i.imgur.com/sKXun87.png

as your runes. That brings your total to 560 + 50 + 30 = 640

• Now suppose you have a Miss Fortune ADC (she's pretty popular). Here's her hp with Doran's Blade: 530 + 80 = 610

Do I make my point? Thresh's items/runes are so screwed right now that if you don't run relic you're almost as squishy as your ADC level 1-3.

This is also why you have to run Aftershock, especially if you don't run relic. The 70-120 MR and Armor you get from it (for 2.5 seconds) is just about >the only thing that allows you to engage & not instantly die. And for a support whose playstyle is supposed to be aggressive and engage heavy that >doesn't make a lot of sense. This isn't Janna we're talking about, where you can sit at 1000 range and press Q/E every 5 seconds.

If you don't want to take coin you have to take relic. You can't start anything (i.e. Doran's Shield) otherwise you're putting your team at a disadvantage for vision - even though relic sucks. That doesn't seem right to me

Noobs

I wanted to address this point because it always gets brought up in discussions about Thresh's winrate. Thresh has never had a fair winrate so a 46.5% winrate (which he has now) isn't the end of the world or anything. But as you can see from the link above it is much lower than what he's had in the past. Since Thresh was added in 2013 his winrate has bounced between 48 and 49%. Ever since Runes Reforged and especially the itemization changes Thresh's winrate has dropped at least 1.5-3%, and his playrate has dropped with it.

It isn't just people being bad with Thresh that's causing this. People have, generally, always been bad with Thresh. I've been playing since Season 3 and when I picked up Thresh I was horrible with him until I hit about ~200k mastery. He is an extremely difficult champion to play well so he was never going to have a high winrate to begin with. And it is also true that people who have "mastered" Thresh - more or less - have much higher winrates. If you look at some of the pro players and Threshmains, such as BunnyFuFuu, Aphromoo, or Kilo Khaos, they all have winrates over 50% (60%+ for Kilo Khaos). That's because his kit is one of the most powerful in the game and extremely rewarding when you know how to use it.

But its not fair to new players who are trying out Thresh to have to deal with not only a very cumbersome kit but also terrible itemization and very mediocre runes.

Closing

I don't know what should be done with Thresh. And that's because there is no easy answer. Any significant buffs to his kit will break the champion, he's that overtuned (which is also why he hasn't received a singular buff in 2 years). At the same time something has to change because of his falling playrate, winrate, and contradictory early game (you must engage but you're squishy and ADC damage is off the charts).

If anything I'd suggest a modest buff to his base hp or maybe lowering the quest gold for relic by 100 and buffing its bonus hp by 10. But I don't know how that would affect other supports (Alistar, Leona, maybe Blitzcrank) so I'd like hear a rioters thoughts on that - especially since they're looking at changing supports in midseason.

Thanks