Board Thread:League of Legends discussion/@comment-25986415-20150108180125/@comment-27024679-20150108213918

His passives general 'feel' of being underpowered is to balance out the fact that it SCALES INFINETLY. Seriously, no other support has this amount of free gold built in as Thresh in their passive, outside of maybe like a late game Janna grouped up with her team. Plus out of all the kill based supports Thresh is probably the one with the highest chance of managing to nab a kill or two for the ADC in the early game, seeing as his Q dosen't cost half of his mana pool like Blitzcrank or need to be level three to do any form of CC locking and being able to survive like Leona. And his lack of MR and general weakness to mages is due to him being a ranged character. Literally all ranged characters have piss poor mr throughout the game. And as you stated in your final paragraph, he loses a good chunk of his squishyness to magic damage later on in the game because he begins to build more magic resistance (like all supports, unless you're facing a pure AD teamcomp). Plus, his lack of ability power scaling is because he is a heavy CC support. They scale off of levels, not items (if you don't count wards ofc).

All in all your complaints are mostly balanced out naturally due to Thresh's ability to help his teammates without relying on damage, his infinite scaling passive which gives him armor and his not hugely mana inefficient spells. This comes at the cost of him having a large chance to fall behind in the early and mid game due to his non-scaling stats and low magic resistance, meaning that he is easily bursted down by mages.

Sorry if this is conviluted to read through, I am writing on an Ipad currently and it feels like too much work to go through everything and fix it.