Are you tired of witnessing the same old meta picks in every game? Perhaps seeing the limited popular picks in every role bores you out. Well, the item and rune diversity in League ensures that you can take up experimental picks for fun.
One of these infamous off-meta picks is the tanky support champion, Thresh. This champion can easily be taken into other lanes as a surprise for your enemy laner. If played well, AD Thresh can turn out to be a surprisingly good addition to your team comp.
AD Thresh makes for a very fun off-meta pick that you can easily flex in your normal games. That said, be sure to follow this in-depth guide to have a blast (and avoid getting reported for trolling).
Also check out: Thresh’s Lantern
Table of Content
show
Thresh Basics
In order to flex this champion in an off-role, you first need to get a decent understanding of how his kit is designed to function. Thresh’s abilities are packed with crowd control, which is what makes him so strong in all roles, and somewhat useful even when behind.
Thresh’s passive drops souls when enemies die nearby. Picking up these souls gives bonus stats to Thresh permanently. This allows Thresh to scale infinitely as the game goes on for longer and longer. His E also has a passive that continuously increases his auto-attack damage.
His Q is a hook that he can reactivate to go to the chained enemy. His W shields him and allies, and allows allies to quickly move to Thresh’s location by clicking on the dropped lantern. Finally, his E is a knockback, and his R a cage that cripples enemy movement speed.
Why You Should Play AD Thresh
Playing AD Thresh is extremely fun for a number of reasons. The biggest reason here is that Thresh has infinite scaling built into his kit. His passive allows him to gain armor and ability power permanently, and his E passive keeps adding bonus damage to his auto-attacks.
AD Thresh can serve as a good niche pick that will often take your opponents by surprise. Thresh is very strong early game and is relevant at all stages of the game thanks to his CC-heavy kit.
People also tend to underestimate the damage AD Thresh deals with his auto attacks, and even if they do see him as a threat, it is very hard to itemise against Thresh’s damage because the bonus damage on your auto attacks is actually dealt as Magic Damage.
As a solo laner, you also have amazing gank setup potential, and can easily secure kills with your jungler thanks to your hook and lantern combo.
Also check: The Ultimate List Of League Of Legends Champions With Stacking Abilities
Possible Roles for AD Thresh
Now that you know what Thresh does and why you should try AD Thresh, we will go in a bit more detail about how you can play this champion. Pick the one you like the most and you will definitely perform well!
Toplane Bruiser
AD Thresh can easily be flexed as a bruiser in the toplane. Naturally, Thresh gains a lot of armour from the souls he collects in a game, which makes him tanky automatically. Sprinkle some attack damage items on top of a couple of tanky items to become the perfect bruiser!
Since Thresh is ranged, he is also almost always at an advantage against enemy toplaners, and not many toplaners can counter him easily. If you are looking for the easiest way to play AD Thresh, this is the way to go!
Also check out: How to cleanse Bard’s ULT
Runes
For toplane Thresh, you should always take Grasp of The Undying as your rune keystone. This rune will give you a decent amount of damage and healing, whilst also making sure you become increasingly tankier as the game progresses.
Pairing Resolve and Precision as primary and secondary rune pages also makes Thresh really strong at trading with the enemy toplaner, while the tankiness of this rune synergises with all the tank items in your build as well.
Items to Build
When playing Thresh in the toplane, you should start by building a tanky mythic item, like Frostfire Gauntlet or Sunfire Aegis. Then you should build some standard AD bruiser items like Titanic Hydra, Wit’s End and Thornmail, paired with defensive boots of your choice depending on the enemy team comp.
In itemisation, keep in mind that you need some attack speed because of Thresh’s slow auto attack wind-up animation. So Wit’s End is a must buy in almost all cases since it gives you on-hit damage, AD as well as Attack Speed. The Magic Resist you get is also a huge plus.
Also check out: AP J4 guide
Midlane or ADC Thresh
In the midlane or if you’re daring enough, the botlane, Thresh is played as an attack damage carry. You would be surprised at how easily this champion can one shot enemy squishies with a single auto attack!
It is a bit more difficult to make this version of AD Thresh work though, because of his relatively short AA range and the glass-cannon nature of his runes and build in the mid and bot lane. However, spreading terror through full AD Thresh will always be super fun!
Runes
For ADC Thresh, you should take Lethal Tempo as the keystone of choice. The main source of Thresh’s damage is his auto attacks because of the insane amount of bonus damage on auto attacks he gets from his E passive, and this rune allows you to get a lot more auto attacks off.
Where Lethal Tempo will ensure massive amounts of DPS for ADC Thresh, you can also take Predator or Hail of Blades on midlane Thresh if you want to build raw AD, one-shot focused Thresh instead of pairing attack damage with attack speed items.
Items to Build
There are two Mythic items that go really well with full damage Thresh. Immortal Shieldbow is a godsend for ADC Thresh while Galeforce pairs up nicely with a more assassin-like full AD Thresh build.
Both of these items give you attack speed and attack damage, core to this playstyle. Shieldbow also adds a ton of survivability for you to dish out DPS for longer, and Galeforce allows you to finish enemies off easily with the missing HP based damage on the dash.
Besides the Mythic, you build standard AD assassin or ADC items like Stormrazor, Rapid Firecannon, Runaan’s Hurricane, Infinity Edge, and Phantom Dancer.
Just make sure to decide between high DPS and high burst i.e crit items and lethality items, and choose your build accordingly.
Also check: Best Blind Pick ADCs in League of Legends
Our Verdict
Since this is a niche pick, there are lots of different ways to play AD Thresh. We recommend the ones described above but if you have any other AD Thresh build or playstyle that works for you, let us know in the comments below!
For more build guides, check out this LoL Nasus build guide.
