Thornmail could use a fix

It's weak and personally i would only rush it as a first item vs the likes of yasuo trynd or irelia to shut them down

Its cheap provides a ton of armor and a nice damage return passive and at the cheap price you can finish it way before they get any of their first items after which they are kind of beaten since they can no longer effectively fight you at all. But its only really worth it if there are more basic attackfocused champions

But that passive is weak and doesn't really scale well at all, yes you gain a bit from the extra armor but not that much and its countered by armorshered, mr, lifesteal, it's just overal not so great.

It used to have 30% damage return which brought the issue of a single 1 stop anti adc item, but this was back when there where little lifesteal options, the amount since has easily doubled which alone would have made things alot better, even magic resist has become better and so have the anti armor options, black cleaver being the problem for thornmail really.

Then came the treads of needs grievous wounds or true damage. But these are bad idea's imho as they bring the original problem back too, it makes the item a 1 item defense wonder again. maybe a bit less problematic as before but still.

The whole idea behind the change to the item was so it wouldn't be bought on literally anyone as a 1 item wonder defense vs adc. Bruisers skirmishers it showed up everywhere and was effective regardless of whatever else you were building heck i saw adc's build it to duel other adc's

So how then do we fix it?

Well its really simple, more scaling

And i am not just suggesting it be flat out buffed or buffed with a price increase, but something like that

It should have an extra scaling, namely health boosting the return damage, i thought about missing health but that might make it complicated for both parties to asses how much damage is going to happen. So for now id go with a flat health scaling

But in order to access this scaling you would need to upgrade the armor

Personally i would propose something simple like this

+ + 350 = 3100 = new item Blade mail 100 armor 200 health Unique: Reflects 15% of the physical damage taken (+ 25% total armor) (+ 1.5% total health) from basic attacks and on-hit effects back to its source as magic damage (Calculated before any resistances or reductions are taken into account).

This way the item will scale with defensive builds in general and not just armor stacking though it will be a particularly good option vs full ad teams. But now it will be an overall better option also when facing mixed damage teams and even be a viable option when a team only has the adc for physical damage.

You will still need to build defense to make it work preferably armor, but you wont be punished really hard if you do not have alot of it as long as you are building alot of health