Thresh Scouting Report
Role: Support, but less married to bot lane (think Morgana)
Resource: Mana
Arsenal: Pulls, leaps, tosses, slows, lock-downs—if it moves you, he can probably do it
Surprises: When his chain-grab ability hits you, it pulls you towards him immediately like other similar abilities. After that initial jerk, though, Thresh can choose to continue to pull you towards him for up to 1.5 seconds longer or leap on top of you.
For a full, detailed list of his abilities, see Riot's official reveal.
This is every Graves' worst nightmare this week.
Rule 1: He's support, but he may not be on bottom lane
Riot's trying to break the extremely rigid metagame that dominated last season, and this week's target is the support role. Usually confined to escorting the AD carry in bottom lane, Thresh's ability kit sets him free to jump around to around to other lanes instead.
I've seen the soul catcher played successfully in every role except jungler, but you can expect to see him in top or bottom lane the vast majority of the time.
His top-lane play is less aggressive than most. He'll simply try to hold his ground in the lane and farm kills to pick up items that can fuel his ult's awesome AP scaling for teamfights (it scales at 100% AP). He can set up ganks for the right type of jungler, so watch out for his CC combos, but it's less reliable than most top lane champs.
If he's bottom lane support, give him the same respect you give a Blitz or Nidalee -- Thresh can ruin your day just as easily from just as far away.
Rule 2: He has the power to move you
The easiest way for Thresh to ruin your day is with his Q, which is a long-range grab that pulls you towards his location for 1.5 seconds, stunning you. Thresh can activate it again to leap on top of you, but he'll usually prefer to stay at range unless he has teammates leaping from the bushes to help him out.
Invest in whiplash insurance now!
You usually just have to be wary of Thresh pulling you into range of towers or enemy champs, where that 1.5 seconds feels like an eternity. The ability has a long wind-up animation that should make it possible to dodge the grab if you're paying attention. And, unlike Blitzcrank's grab, Death Sentence can't pull you through walls.
If Thresh does leap on top of you, expect to get thrown in another direction soon after (invest in whiplash insurance now!). His E lets Thresh move all units in a line centered on himself either towards or away from him. There's not much you can do to avoid it, but the distance traveled is minimal and the targeting is awkward enough that plenty of new Thresh players push when they mean to pull and vice versa, so you may get lucky and get sent to safety!
There's poetic justice in turning the tables on Thresh with Veigar's gate.
Rule 3: Don't break the box
Think back to last time you were trapped inside Veigar's big stun gate, Event Horizon. You stay inside it because the stun will last longer than the gate does, right?
Take the same strategy with Thresh's ultimate, The Box, which erects a pentagon around him made up of five connecting walls. The Box won't stun you, but it will slow you by 99% and deal huge damage to you (scaling at that very high 100% AP ratio I mentioned earlier), which is probably worse.
The trick is that each wall shatters and disappears individually when an enemy champ runs into it, and every wall broken after the first deals half damage. That means there's one simple rule for The Box: make the tank break it while everyone rushes out behind him.
Keep in mind that you need to travel out the same side of The Box as the tank if you don't want to get hit, so tanks should choose which wall they break wisely.
Rule 4: He wants you to run away
Thresh's biggest weakness is dueling. He can toss you around all day long, but he can't stand toe-to-toe with most champs, and especially not the top-laners like Darius, Jayce, Singed, and the rest.
When Thresh leaps onto you, he wants you to run away so that the walls from his ultimate, which land a moderate distance from him (think Jarvan's Ult), will land right on top of you. If you stay right in his face, he has to use all of his abilities to push or pull you into a wall, and that leaves him with no abilities to follow it up with.
Thresh's auto-attack whip has decent range (and looks pretty darn awesome for the record), so he'll also get a few free hits in if you try to run away. Don't do that. If you're going to engage, go in hard and stay on him. You can easily force him to run away, and maybe even blow his ult to ensure you don't chase.
Talon and Graves both failed to read this article. They paid with their lives.
Rule 5: Free teleports, all week long!
I saved his biggest trick for last. This is the reason to ban him in draft games—and yes, he's absolutely bannable, especially during the first weeks when your teammates don't expect/understand his abilities.
Thresh can throw out his creepy lantern with his W ability, giving sight of an area and applying a damage shield to any allies that walk near it while it's out there. The range on this ability is fairly absurd (roughly Wraith camp brush to the nearest tower), letting him toss it over two separate walls in some jungle locations.
Yes, that is as scary as it sounds.
That long range wouldn't be so scary if it wasn't for the last element of the ability: any allied champion can click the lantern to get pulled back to Thresh's current location. The lantern gets pulled too, so it's only usable once, but the pull works over walls and gives every champion on the team a brilliant escape tool.Yes, that is as scary as it sounds, especially with aggressive melee assassins that can jump in, burst through all their abilities and then lantern lasso out before you can return the damage.
Larger champions like Cho'Gath can try to block vision of the lantern for the enemy team, but it doesn't (currently) appear possible to actually block use of it. Hovering over the lantern's position will offer the ability whether it's visible or not.
Your best tactic is to make sure that Thresh is within striking distance, and don't overextend if Thresh is nearby. You're unlikely to score the kill and might set the enemy team up for a strong counter attack if you risk too much trying to pursue it. And, of course, expect a jungler gank if you see an enemy Thresh near you throw his lantern into the jungle.
Josh Augustine has enjoyed League of Legends since closed beta. His favorite champion is Talon, he's never enjoyed a Darius, and he will always go for the kill, even when he knows he shouldn't. He's written about MMOs and MOBAs like LoL for years and currently works at Sony Online Entertainment as a content designer on EverQuest. You can talk with him on Twitter.Twitter.
Bone whips, soul draining, and a makeshift prison called The Box? Sounds like exactly the sort of interrogation I was trained for. How are you holding up against Thresh this week?