Pantheon's been off the radar it seems

Both with players and Rito. I think the last time I saw something about him was about 6 months ago when discussing changing his stun and the answer was along the lines of "maybe, but it'd probably just have the exact same impact as now but make players have to relearn something core to his play."

There are honestly PLENTY of reasons why he just...fell off.

1. Meta shifted into a tankier meta where you actually had a frontline instead of 2-3 divers. Panth CAN tank bust, but better vs squishies.
2. The tank meta put tanks up toplane instead of purely in the jungle, making his laning phase harder. Not that it was hard to be begin with, but Pantheon thrives on a fast start and slowing him down drastically affects his power curve.
3. The change to BC just royally screwed him. It's definitely possible to go Brut->BC since it would be a good idea to build a belt after brut before building into BC. But now his mid game is drastically slowed down since Brutalizer doesn't build into anything he uses. No, Youmous is not good on Pantheon except very late, especially as a main damage item. Hydra is now the absolutely go-to instead of only a bit better than a BC rush (actually was really good due to the nature of the shred and flat pen.)
4. The change to the flat mana regen in support pretty much killed his early game harass with Q since over the course of 5 minutes, he lost almost 7 spears. This makes his flask3 start much weaker since it can't overwhelm the enemy as much, but dblade isn't exactly stellar either as he is usually fighting tanks.

So what we have is a Pantheon that has a good but slow start, has either slow mid game scaling or is squishy as hell in a meta where melee should be tanky. The new BC on Pantheon is amazing on Pantheon. The extra shred and cdr gives his team more damage while also giving him a bit more tankiness and mobility with reduced W cd. His build path just doesn't flow well.

Riven doesn't really suffer for this because while you'll want SOME hp/resist so you don't get blow up while cced, AD still gives her more shield. And Talon doesn't really suffer because he has a blink, stealth, and mobile aoe. Pantheon is in this weird spot where he's both a fighter and an assassin AND he has to sit still to really deal any meaningful damage.

If Pantheon were to get a base damage buff on his Q and E (like +15% or so), he'd skyrocket back up and be enormously frustrating to play against. I should know because I bullied the hell out of people and made them want to break their keyboard. The mixture of the targeted nuke that has the effective range of Sivir in a melee-centric lane with a 1 second stun and a 0.75 second channel on an insanely high scaling aoe plus auto crits as 15% hp would allow Pantheon to pull off some ridiculous 100-0s where the enemy literally could not do anything. That's not healthy for the game, but I would like to see what Riot plans to with Pantheon because his mid/late game was much more healthy but, more importantly, much more versatile in build paths and team roles.

Sure, you could pick out the enemy ADC and 100-0 him, but if the enemy could peel you off, you would just die. So he can itemize as a bouncer and dps the tank down, rather ludicrously effectively in Season 4 I might add. Or he could 100-0 divers like Zed and Kha (remember Season 4?) He could also initiate with his ult along with someone like Thresh to pin the enemy between a rock and a hard place and force them to fight. He can still do all of that in theory, but his snowballing is now much harder near the end of season 5 than the end of Season 4 and if he does get to those items, he can definitely bring the pain. He just can't really get to those items like he used to.

So I would love for a Rioter to comment about Pantheon's direction if they can since you guys are getting your hands dirty with the fighter project and Pantheon is most definitely a fighter.