Over the weekend I uploaded a jungle Thresh video. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
To begin, let me state emphatically that Thresh is a very difficult jungler.
The fancy kiting I do at Blue buff, the over the wall hooks, and the other execution optimizations you see in the video are not for show, they are all entirely necessary for Thresh to clear quickly and safely when he does not receive help. Without those optimizations Thresh's health falls dangerously low at Red buff, low enough that clearing Wraiths is a matter of how many crits you received at Wolves earlier in the clear, and if you do clear it is many seconds slower. To achieve the "par" of 4:00 game time with a respectable amount of health those tricky maneuvers were critical.
It's come up before, but I believe strongly in the need for junglers to practice jungling without help. This is not because no one will ever help you, but because sometimes they can't or something goes horribly wrong. Thresh is exactly the sort of jungler who catches unsuspecting players unawares, consigning them to disaster when anything out of the ordinary occurs.
On top of his potential to flounder on his first clear, Thresh also requires skillful use of skillshots in order to gank and support his team effectively. You must be able to land hooks, must be able to reflexively knock champions in the proper direction with his displacement, and must be able to judge the timing and proper placement of his lantern and ultimate. A Thresh who lacks any of these qualities, in or out of the jungle, will often be a liability.
Now that I've finished scaring you away from Thresh, let me state emphatically that Thresh is also a very powerful jungler.
Everyone hates and bans Blitzcrank for good reasons, and Thresh is worthy of the same ire. While his hook has a much greater windup time, its potential is no less frightening. It actually has a longer range than Blitzcrank's Rocket Grab, meaning Thresh can actually throw it from outside an opponent's vision. The long stun gives your allies ample time to move in and go for the kill, and following it up with Thresh's other displacement ability can result in equivalent or greater pulls than Blitzcrank.
Thresh also doesn't decent damage without needing to itemize for it. So long as he collects souls his Q passive will allow him to deal significant magic damage on each auto attack. In a long game he can easily function as though he had four Wit's Ends or more (minus the Attack Speed). Combined with his Armor and AP gains, he can be frighteningly tanky and still effective.
Playing Thresh requires finesse, but if you're willing to put in the hard work to learn the champion it is well worth the effort.
Showing posts with label Thresh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thresh. Show all posts
Monday, January 28, 2013
Friday, January 25, 2013
Initial Jungle Thresh Impressions
I had the opportunity to jungle Thresh in a ranked game last night. I've been tooling around with it for a while, and I have a few thoughts as to its viability.
First and foremost, Thresh's initial clear speed is slow and dodgy. Even going full offense and abusing early Smites to make use of Executioner, he still finishes after 4:00 game time. He can clear without help, but the aid of his team is extremely pivotal in helping him do so quickly and safely.
Second, it may have just been the game I played, but it seemed entirely worth it. His hook may not be as instantaneous as Blitzcrank's Rocket Grab, but the long duration stun combined with the displacement and the potential to follow up with another displacement is extremely potent for ganks. His lantern is a huge asset for tower dives, allowing one ally to essentially "Flash out" without blowing summoner spells. All in all, his utility is undeniable.
The rate at which Thresh gained souls as a jungler was a little behind the ideal. A well played Thresh gains roughly 40 souls per 10 minutes played, but in the Jungle it's closer to 30-35. With better farm, or better luck when ganking, it might have gone better.
Attack Speed is definitively vital to keeping Thresh's clear speed competitive. I built Wit's End due to Thresh's low Magic Resistance, but that may not be the best or only option.
There are still tests I need to do before I conclude I've found his "optimal" setup. Even if I do find a superior setup I think it likely he'll be much more popular as a support than as a jungler (simply due to degree of difficulty). Still, I think he has potential worthy of further experimentation.
First and foremost, Thresh's initial clear speed is slow and dodgy. Even going full offense and abusing early Smites to make use of Executioner, he still finishes after 4:00 game time. He can clear without help, but the aid of his team is extremely pivotal in helping him do so quickly and safely.
Second, it may have just been the game I played, but it seemed entirely worth it. His hook may not be as instantaneous as Blitzcrank's Rocket Grab, but the long duration stun combined with the displacement and the potential to follow up with another displacement is extremely potent for ganks. His lantern is a huge asset for tower dives, allowing one ally to essentially "Flash out" without blowing summoner spells. All in all, his utility is undeniable.
The rate at which Thresh gained souls as a jungler was a little behind the ideal. A well played Thresh gains roughly 40 souls per 10 minutes played, but in the Jungle it's closer to 30-35. With better farm, or better luck when ganking, it might have gone better.
Attack Speed is definitively vital to keeping Thresh's clear speed competitive. I built Wit's End due to Thresh's low Magic Resistance, but that may not be the best or only option.
There are still tests I need to do before I conclude I've found his "optimal" setup. Even if I do find a superior setup I think it likely he'll be much more popular as a support than as a jungler (simply due to degree of difficulty). Still, I think he has potential worthy of further experimentation.
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Patch Day: Balance Update 2
Thresh is coming later, but for now we have plenty of patch notes to evaluate. There's a lot to cover so I won't mention every change and bug fix.
Some of Alistar's nerfs have been rolled back. His jungling in Season 3 took a significant hit, and he's long since fallen off the ban lists, so Riot probably felt safe giving him a little nudge.
Annie gets a few quality of life changes, and a visual upgrade in the near future. Despite her lack of popularity straight buffs aren't necessary. If bruiser/assassin teams continue to be popular Annie is likely to see a lot of play for her AoE damage/initiation and tankiness.
Blitzcrank's passive gets duly hit with the nerf bat. For his trouble he does get vision on grabbed targets, which is a huge quality of life change. Knowing that you've landed a grab thrown into fog of war (and who you landed that grab on) is extremely important information.
After being given a very thorough beating in previous patches, Diana has been given some recompense. While she won't resume her frightening domination of the meta (in part because of all the AD assassins now chilling in the mid lane), restoring some of range to her ultimate and giving her shield extra duration and collision detection will be very noticeable.
Evelynn, who is all too familiar with the nerf bat, received another round of nerfs. The bonus Attack Damage ratios on Q and W aren't all that significant in the face of increased mana costs and cooldowns couple with reduced range and damage. Evelynn will still be good, but definitely not as good.
Changing Ezreal's base attack speed may not seem like a big deal, but it's actually huge. That 0.04 reduction is equivalent to reducing the effectiveness of all Attack Speed on Ezreal by 6-7%. A similar nerf dropped Graves from favor not long ago. To be honest, however, I doubt Ezreal will cede from popularity until Riot increases the cooldown on Arcane Shift.
Today we lay to rest the most enduring and frustrating bug of all time, Kassadin's reverse Force Pulse. Surviving through the beta all the way to the present day, the Force Pulse bug has befuddled and infuriated Kassadin players for years. It will not be missed.
Kha'zix, everyone's favorite overgrown cockroach, was understandably nerfed. He's been extremely popular even in the post-nerf Black Cleaver era due to his ridiculous damage with just that one item. His poke with evolved W is also extremely potent. Both of those aspects of him have been nerfed, but not by enough to sate the anger of his detractors.
Lee Sin didn't see these nerfs coming. The armor on Safeguard has been removed, and the range and effectiveness of his Cripple have also been reduced. These changes will hit both his survivability in the jungle and lane, and his early gank strength. He will still be overpowered in the right hands, and hilariously useless in the wrong ones.
The little support, Nami, received a few small buffs. The speed increase on her ultimate will make it much easier to hit, but isn't so large as to reduce the ominous, slow nature and corresponding psychological factor. The change to her base movement speed should her when trading early or trying to land her stun.
Rengar received changes which are, for the most part, actually buffs. Stacking health early on Rengar will no longer yield impossible healing values, but regardless of what you build the healing at level 18 is equialvent to what you would have received if you had 4000 Health. With extra Attack Damage on his Bonetooth Necklace and longer duration Attack Speed buffs and stealth, he's actually probably slightly better in the late game. The problem is whether he can still lane well, which remains to be seen.
Riven can thank her lucky stars she wasn't nerfed as hard as Evelynn, but she still received quite a few herself. The hits to her sustain and damage mitigation are big, and the cooldown nerf on her ultimate will severely impact her effectiveness early on. She might be fine regardless, but Riven players are definitely going to notice these changes.
Syndra gets a couple notable buffs. The increased range on her ultimate at level 16 makes her dramatically easier to use in a teamfight, and reducing the cooldown on her push back makes her harder to reach. It's likely we'll now see her in competitive play.
While Talon got nailed with the nerf bat at first glance, his ability to assassinate targets actually hasn't changed. His AoE damage took a hit, but that was largely necessary due to the bug on his E. Without these nerfs that bug fix would actually have made him incredibly strong.
Udyr, long forgotten after the "farm forever" jungle meta died in Season 2, has finally received a buff. It's not a huge buff, but 12% Armor and Magic Resistance will help him survive being kited long enough to accomplish something, hopefully.
Vi stands for viable. It only took more quality of life changes and bug fixes than any champion, to my knowledge, has ever received in a single patch before.
In addition to all the champion changes, there are some other changes of note.
Jungle creeps have redistributed health toward the bigger creeps, and picked up some extra gold in the process. The advantage of AoE junglers is now close to non-existent. Jungle gold values are at a point where simply farming the jungle is equivalent to a lane where creeps are last-hit with 75% accuracy. Depending on where the meta goes we might see some interesting changes in who we place in the jungle.
There are a lot of item change, but I'm going to stick to the most important ones.
Crystalline Flask's cost has gone up by 120 gold. It's now cost efficient after 6 uses, rather than 3, but only after it's sold. In the meantime you've locked 345 gold down for infinite potions. It won't be a bad item, but it will be harder to fit into builds.
Last Whisper now has a greater combine cost, raising its price to 2300 gold. This nerfs AD carries, and also nerfs bruisers who stacked Black Cleaver and Last Whisper. I'm curious why they felt this was necessary.
Iceborne Gauntlet remains a very good item even after the nerfs. The duration of the field isn't a particularly damaging change when you're chasing people as they tend to run out before 3 seconds are up anyway. However, it is noticeable when running away.
Spirit of the Spectral Wraith and Spirit of the Lizard Elder both got additional stats for free. They generally hadn't been picked up very often, and may yet see more buffs before they are accepted as useful items. Health regeneration simply isn't valued highly by the community (with reason).
Finally, the minimap now features animations/icons for when teammates recall or teleport. The next time I ping for my team to back off, tell them in chat that I'm no condition to fight and need to spend gold, and then recall, they'll now have three different vectors of communication they ignored rather than just two.
This is actually a very big patch even without Thresh and the upcoming changes to how rankings are determined. It seems bit much this early in Season 3, when players still have so much to figure out. We'll see if Riot continues this trend of extensive changes throughout the year.
Some of Alistar's nerfs have been rolled back. His jungling in Season 3 took a significant hit, and he's long since fallen off the ban lists, so Riot probably felt safe giving him a little nudge.
Annie gets a few quality of life changes, and a visual upgrade in the near future. Despite her lack of popularity straight buffs aren't necessary. If bruiser/assassin teams continue to be popular Annie is likely to see a lot of play for her AoE damage/initiation and tankiness.
Blitzcrank's passive gets duly hit with the nerf bat. For his trouble he does get vision on grabbed targets, which is a huge quality of life change. Knowing that you've landed a grab thrown into fog of war (and who you landed that grab on) is extremely important information.
After being given a very thorough beating in previous patches, Diana has been given some recompense. While she won't resume her frightening domination of the meta (in part because of all the AD assassins now chilling in the mid lane), restoring some of range to her ultimate and giving her shield extra duration and collision detection will be very noticeable.
Evelynn, who is all too familiar with the nerf bat, received another round of nerfs. The bonus Attack Damage ratios on Q and W aren't all that significant in the face of increased mana costs and cooldowns couple with reduced range and damage. Evelynn will still be good, but definitely not as good.
Changing Ezreal's base attack speed may not seem like a big deal, but it's actually huge. That 0.04 reduction is equivalent to reducing the effectiveness of all Attack Speed on Ezreal by 6-7%. A similar nerf dropped Graves from favor not long ago. To be honest, however, I doubt Ezreal will cede from popularity until Riot increases the cooldown on Arcane Shift.
Today we lay to rest the most enduring and frustrating bug of all time, Kassadin's reverse Force Pulse. Surviving through the beta all the way to the present day, the Force Pulse bug has befuddled and infuriated Kassadin players for years. It will not be missed.
Kha'zix, everyone's favorite overgrown cockroach, was understandably nerfed. He's been extremely popular even in the post-nerf Black Cleaver era due to his ridiculous damage with just that one item. His poke with evolved W is also extremely potent. Both of those aspects of him have been nerfed, but not by enough to sate the anger of his detractors.
Lee Sin didn't see these nerfs coming. The armor on Safeguard has been removed, and the range and effectiveness of his Cripple have also been reduced. These changes will hit both his survivability in the jungle and lane, and his early gank strength. He will still be overpowered in the right hands, and hilariously useless in the wrong ones.
The little support, Nami, received a few small buffs. The speed increase on her ultimate will make it much easier to hit, but isn't so large as to reduce the ominous, slow nature and corresponding psychological factor. The change to her base movement speed should her when trading early or trying to land her stun.
Rengar received changes which are, for the most part, actually buffs. Stacking health early on Rengar will no longer yield impossible healing values, but regardless of what you build the healing at level 18 is equialvent to what you would have received if you had 4000 Health. With extra Attack Damage on his Bonetooth Necklace and longer duration Attack Speed buffs and stealth, he's actually probably slightly better in the late game. The problem is whether he can still lane well, which remains to be seen.
Riven can thank her lucky stars she wasn't nerfed as hard as Evelynn, but she still received quite a few herself. The hits to her sustain and damage mitigation are big, and the cooldown nerf on her ultimate will severely impact her effectiveness early on. She might be fine regardless, but Riven players are definitely going to notice these changes.
Syndra gets a couple notable buffs. The increased range on her ultimate at level 16 makes her dramatically easier to use in a teamfight, and reducing the cooldown on her push back makes her harder to reach. It's likely we'll now see her in competitive play.
While Talon got nailed with the nerf bat at first glance, his ability to assassinate targets actually hasn't changed. His AoE damage took a hit, but that was largely necessary due to the bug on his E. Without these nerfs that bug fix would actually have made him incredibly strong.
Udyr, long forgotten after the "farm forever" jungle meta died in Season 2, has finally received a buff. It's not a huge buff, but 12% Armor and Magic Resistance will help him survive being kited long enough to accomplish something, hopefully.
Vi stands for viable. It only took more quality of life changes and bug fixes than any champion, to my knowledge, has ever received in a single patch before.
In addition to all the champion changes, there are some other changes of note.
Jungle creeps have redistributed health toward the bigger creeps, and picked up some extra gold in the process. The advantage of AoE junglers is now close to non-existent. Jungle gold values are at a point where simply farming the jungle is equivalent to a lane where creeps are last-hit with 75% accuracy. Depending on where the meta goes we might see some interesting changes in who we place in the jungle.
There are a lot of item change, but I'm going to stick to the most important ones.
Crystalline Flask's cost has gone up by 120 gold. It's now cost efficient after 6 uses, rather than 3, but only after it's sold. In the meantime you've locked 345 gold down for infinite potions. It won't be a bad item, but it will be harder to fit into builds.
Last Whisper now has a greater combine cost, raising its price to 2300 gold. This nerfs AD carries, and also nerfs bruisers who stacked Black Cleaver and Last Whisper. I'm curious why they felt this was necessary.
Iceborne Gauntlet remains a very good item even after the nerfs. The duration of the field isn't a particularly damaging change when you're chasing people as they tend to run out before 3 seconds are up anyway. However, it is noticeable when running away.
Spirit of the Spectral Wraith and Spirit of the Lizard Elder both got additional stats for free. They generally hadn't been picked up very often, and may yet see more buffs before they are accepted as useful items. Health regeneration simply isn't valued highly by the community (with reason).
Finally, the minimap now features animations/icons for when teammates recall or teleport. The next time I ping for my team to back off, tell them in chat that I'm no condition to fight and need to spend gold, and then recall, they'll now have three different vectors of communication they ignored rather than just two.
This is actually a very big patch even without Thresh and the upcoming changes to how rankings are determined. It seems bit much this early in Season 3, when players still have so much to figure out. We'll see if Riot continues this trend of extensive changes throughout the year.
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
PBE: Thresh Math Mk. II
Not long after I completed yesterday's math on Thresh's passive a PBE update went out. This removed the Magic Resistance from Thresh's passive (at least in the tooltip), which obviously changes the math.
So with the recent update we must modify our equation for value:
Gold Value = (# of Souls / 2 + 12.75) * (18 + 20) - 1296g
With the factors representing MR removed, this gives us the following numbers:
Beyond curbing the absurd value of Thresh's passive, this change serves an important function. Before it was incredibly easy for Thresh to become impossible for AP carries to kill. Being able to exceed 100 Magic Resistance without any items or runes was silly. With the Magic Resistance removed from his passive, he'll no longer be the most abusive mid champion since LeBlanc's release.
So with the recent update we must modify our equation for value:
Gold Value = (# of Souls / 2 + 12.75) * (18 + 20) - 1296g
With the factors representing MR removed, this gives us the following numbers:
- 50: 138.5g
- 100: 1088.5g
- 150: 2038.5g
- 200: 2988.5g
- 250: 3938.5g
Beyond curbing the absurd value of Thresh's passive, this change serves an important function. Before it was incredibly easy for Thresh to become impossible for AP carries to kill. Being able to exceed 100 Magic Resistance without any items or runes was silly. With the Magic Resistance removed from his passive, he'll no longer be the most abusive mid champion since LeBlanc's release.
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
PBE: Thresh Math
Thresh has hit the PBE, and he brings an interesting new mechanic, soul collection.
Every time a minion or jungle monster dies near Thresh it has a chance to drop a soul, with larger minions/monsters having a near 100% chance. Each soul Thresh collects gives him permanent Armor, Magic Resistance, and Ability Power, and also increases the damage of his auto-attacks through Q. The first handful of souls are worth more than later ones. For most numbers (beyond 30 or so) the math is simple:
Bonus Armor/MR/AP = Souls / 2 + 12.75
At 100 souls Thresh has 62.75 bonus Armor/MR/AP. That's a lot, and as a result Thresh's base Armor and Magic Resistance do not increase with level.
So how valuable is this passive anyway? To understand that we first must understand what Thresh has lost by losing out on level-based Armor and Magic Resistance.
All champions that have scaling Magic Resistance gain 1.25 per level, resulting in an additional 21.25 Magic Resistance at level 18 which Thresh misses out on. Magic Resistance costs 18 gold per point, so we'll have to subtract 382.5 gold when calculating the value of Thresh's passive.
The highest Armor scaling in the game is 4 per level and the lowest is 2.7, meaning 48.6 - 72 Armor that Thresh will not have at level 18. Armor also costs 18 gold per point, so that means another 1296 gold (to make the harshest assumption) subtracted from the value of Thresh's passive.
Finally, Ability Power costs 20 gold per point (based on Needlessly Large Rod). So the math for the gold value of Thresh's passive is fairly simple:
Gold Value = (# of Souls / 2 + 12.75) * (18 + 18 + 20) - 382.5g - 1296g
That gives us the following values at various soul numbers:
As we can see, this passive is worth a ridiculous amount of gold even once we've accounted for the loss of per-level stats, and that's without considering that all of these souls add to the damage of his Q's passive. Thresh gains so much without gold that he makes an ideal support. So long as he carefully times his warding excursions he'll easily stack hundreds of souls and be ridiculously tanky for a support.
Every time a minion or jungle monster dies near Thresh it has a chance to drop a soul, with larger minions/monsters having a near 100% chance. Each soul Thresh collects gives him permanent Armor, Magic Resistance, and Ability Power, and also increases the damage of his auto-attacks through Q. The first handful of souls are worth more than later ones. For most numbers (beyond 30 or so) the math is simple:
Bonus Armor/MR/AP = Souls / 2 + 12.75
At 100 souls Thresh has 62.75 bonus Armor/MR/AP. That's a lot, and as a result Thresh's base Armor and Magic Resistance do not increase with level.
So how valuable is this passive anyway? To understand that we first must understand what Thresh has lost by losing out on level-based Armor and Magic Resistance.
All champions that have scaling Magic Resistance gain 1.25 per level, resulting in an additional 21.25 Magic Resistance at level 18 which Thresh misses out on. Magic Resistance costs 18 gold per point, so we'll have to subtract 382.5 gold when calculating the value of Thresh's passive.
The highest Armor scaling in the game is 4 per level and the lowest is 2.7, meaning 48.6 - 72 Armor that Thresh will not have at level 18. Armor also costs 18 gold per point, so that means another 1296 gold (to make the harshest assumption) subtracted from the value of Thresh's passive.
Finally, Ability Power costs 20 gold per point (based on Needlessly Large Rod). So the math for the gold value of Thresh's passive is fairly simple:
Gold Value = (# of Souls / 2 + 12.75) * (18 + 18 + 20) - 382.5g - 1296g
That gives us the following values at various soul numbers:
- 50: 435.5g
- 100: 1835.5g
- 150: 3235.5g
- 200: 4635.5g
- 250: 6035.5g
As we can see, this passive is worth a ridiculous amount of gold even once we've accounted for the loss of per-level stats, and that's without considering that all of these souls add to the damage of his Q's passive. Thresh gains so much without gold that he makes an ideal support. So long as he carefully times his warding excursions he'll easily stack hundreds of souls and be ridiculously tanky for a support.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)