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:

• 50: 435.5g
• 100: 1835.5g
• 150: 3235.5g
• 200: 4635.5g
• 250: 6035.5g

Generally speaking, 100 souls is what I would expect an average player performing normally to collect by the mid-game. 200 souls would be fairly typical for the late game. Expert players might collect as many as 150 or 300 souls (or more) at those same points respectively.

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.