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Proposed Thresh changes

H3x3n3·11/17/2014, 8:15:08 PM·1 votes·807 views

It seems to me that Thresh is one of those champions that is in need of some tweaks/changes/nerfs. He is a very popular support and routinely seems to make it into the top picked champions across all levels of play. The reasons for this are quite good as he provides a tremendous level of utility, solid damage, is very naturally tanky and works with just about any style of team composition/lane partner. To compensate for his innate strengths he has a fairly high skill cap. So you may be asking, "Why does he need a change if the technical level of play required to use him well compensates for his innate strengths?" Well his problems as I see them are as follows:

  • He has very high base damage coupled with a large range, making him incredibly effective at harassing/zoning and generally controlling a lane,
  • He is also fairly tanky with his passive which makes trading with him rather unfavorable and compounds his high damage+range, and
  • There is no good way to counter his lantern, the argument has been made that you just have to stand on it, but in practice it is far easier to simply click it than to position yourself ontop of it and execute a stop command giving Thresh's teammates a distinct bias in a way similar to how Zac's blobs used to favor him picking them up over being squished. This bias is further exacerbated by his lantern providing an instant AOE shield for any of his teammates in the area. It is, IMO, his best spell and there isn't really much skill at all involved in using it well.

In order to address these issues I have a couple of suggestions:

The first and easiest to implement would be to reduce Thresh's base damage on abilities/attacks to compensate for the amount of offensive AND defensive utility he provides. Change the way his lantern works. I have several ideas on this,

  1. Make it so that the enemy team can ALSO just click on it to root it in place, or
  2. Change it to a channel in such a way that thresh can still move while it is out, but he cannot attack or use other abilities and should he be CC'd or suffer enough damage that his shield breaks the lantern will retract, or
  3. Remove the shield component. I feel that any of these options would help to reduce the frustration factor for the opposing team when a lantern is thrown out. It would also make a thresh player have to think more about positioning/timing when tossing it out.

Anyway, these are my thoughts on the subject. Please let me know what you think, other than "Wall of text = TLDR".

Thanks!

3 Comments

Done2511/17/2014, 9:11:08 PM2 votes

Please do remember that he has absolutely abysmal base damages and laughable scaling. His Lantern and Box now only affect one target as well.

Marthian11/17/2014, 8:55:56 PM1 votes

I think these are some good steps in the right direction. Especially on his high damage values.

On the passive, do remember he has no Armor/level. Zoning him out of getting souls helps stop him from getting tanky.

H3x3n311/17/2014, 9:49:51 PM1 votes

My main issue with his damage isn't that it scales well, which it does decently for a support, but rather that his damage in lane, especially at early levels is high for the amount of utility, offensive AND defensive that he provides. It's not major, but I feel that it could use a slight debuff. Really my main issue is the way the lantern works. My other points were largely there to support what I feel would be justifiable changes to the way it operates. I mean he already provides great CC and damage ontop of having a very difficult to counter "get out of jail free" card. I feel that the lantern allows the enemy ADC to take much greater risk than is normally acceptable because they have an instant out in situations that SHOULD have resulted in their death and that the counter to this isn't really very feasible unless you are fiddlesticks (Can just stand there and still do damage ha).