(Suggestion) Pantheon Mechanics Revised

[{quoted}](name=Dominick Destine,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=o96Tivvf,comment-id=0000,timestamp=2016-03-28T03:11:12.508+0000)

At least Panth is gated by mana and has no escape mechanism.

Brainless faceroll champs like are manaless and have multiple low cd escape mechanisms.

has Energy, and a full combo of W-E-Q will cost him 165 of his 200 energy at level 3. Furthermore, his shadow has an 18 second cooldown at level one, and is maxed last (or second). 18 seconds is hardly short.

's safeguard requires targets to dash to - warding trinket has a cooldown of what, a minute? He's also gated by energy, and needs to keep auto attacking (that is, stay in range of enemy units) to keep his energy levels high enough to keep fighting. However low the CD is, it's gated by energy - even at a 0.1 second cool down, it'd be impossible to spam.

can dash only into the enemy, and is immobile if there's nothing for him to surf on. Areas such as baron/drake pit, or the river, are places where he can easily be caught in - not to mention how dangerous it is to dash into the enemy team in a teamfight.

And, well, all of them are mechanically intense, high skillcap champions. Saying that they're "braindead" or "faceroll" is...frankly speaking, outright wrong.

I have provided an extensive argument for the design problems with Pantheon and addressed both the mana and escape mechanism subjects. Those don't make up for the overall design issues found in Pantheon's kit. If you would like to provide an actual analysis of why you feel Lee, Zed, and Yasuo are "brainless faceroll champs" and how you think they could be fixed in a way that makes them less "brainless faceroll" in nature, I would be interested to see it. They might be strong when played expertly, but that strength is coupled with much higher requisite mechanical skill to achieve reasonable levels of success in comparison to a champion like Pantheon. An unskilled player using Zed, Yasuo, or Lee Sin would have a far harder time than an unskilled player using Pantheon. All three of them may have "escapes," but those escapes all require more consideration and meaningful decision-making than is found in literally Pantheon's entire current kit combined, aside from maybe his ultimate.

First of all, thanks for the good feedback! The point of sharing these kinds of suggestions is to get new points of view on the matter and I really appreciate that you've taken the time to provide a quality response.

Yep, this would be an enormous nerf to champ that is already okay. In order to compensate for the increased cooldown on Q at range and the removal of his guaranteed stun he would need to have his Q be spamable in melee and at a reduced mana cost. Basically, if he is within melee his Q needs be at something like a 2 second CD.

Yeah, right now it stands as an overall nerf, and it should be from range. I was thinking that there should be some form of buff for the Q at close range in particular. The reason I didn't specifically state a change to the Q cooldown at close range is due to Pantheon's high cooldown reduction itemization. He often reaches near 40% CDR, and if he does reach 40% CDR his Q cooldown is 2.4 seconds. Reducing the cooldown on Q at close range would have to be relatively minimal to account for this. However, reduced mana costs and/or higher damage numbers for the close range Q are certainly things that I think would be fair, especially because I would like Pantheon to be refocused with his real strengths in melee range as opposed to poking at a distance. Hell, I imagine lower mana costs and possibly higher damage would be acceptable on the ranged poke as well, as he has other tradeoffs he has to make with the longer cooldown, and he has incentive in the form of a shorter cooldown to move into close range to recover his spear. The important part is that Pantheon's player has to make decisions about what they want to do that are more complicated than "Do I have more than 100 mana and the enemy is in range of my Q? If yes, press Q on enemy."

The changes you propose means he auto loses lane to any strong melee that has a dash. Think Riven, Renekton or even Talon. All of them want to be in melee and All of them can choose to enter melee basically at will. So, now you have this version of Pantheon that is useless in melee if he hasn't primed these conditions. The "aspect of war" would just get his ass handed to him by a crocodile or a moody kid with daggers. Additionally, no one in their right mind would ever let pantheon get his stun in lane. It would simply be "oh, he Q'd me. Time to play safe for a few seconds then kill him cause he has no stun and no Q".

That's certainly a fair argument for the stun. My primary concern with the stun is that it is both a gap-closer and a stun that can be very unpredictable. If we compare Pantheon with other champions classically played in the top lane with a stun, Renekton's stun requires melee range, Jax's stun is both telegraphed and melee-ranged, Riven's stun is melee-ranged, Irelia's stun requires that she has lower health than her target and is melee-ranged, Gnar's stun is both close range and heavily telegraphed, Poppy's is a gap-closer but it also requires that you get hit into terrain, and Sion's is both avoidable and very heavily telegraphed. All of these champions have to commit in some way, spend some other ability (usually a separate gap-closing ability), or fulfill a specific circumstance to facilitate their stun. Pantheon, on the other hand, has both his gap closer and his stun on a single 600 range ability with minimal/non-existent telegraphing. While it's important to consider each ability within the context of the champion's kit, in Pantheon's case this results in low interaction confrontations with minimal risk for Pantheon when combined with his Q poke play pattern--he doesn't have to commit anything until he wants to, and he stuns as soon as he commits. Pantheon will be much weaker than most or all of these champions if he doesn't get ahead, which is honestly something I would like to see addressed as well, but which may require more significant changes to the nature of his abilities.

One solution might be to move the stun to the E lasting for the duration of the channel, possibly increasing the E duration to 1 second, with the duration of E further increased on an Impale Q->W. This would give Pantheon an AoE stun that can be used immediately after the W, making him commit more to the stun. There could be a problem in increasing his channel time as the channel already feels a bit weird and clunky on Pantheon and it would hold him down from moving or really taking advantage of his stun with other abilities/auto-attacks. The ability could be changed such that it's still an AoE cone stun, but without the channel time. This would possibly need reduced damage without the mobility tradeoff of the channel, but I'm not getting into damage specifics very much because that seems like something that would require playtesting.

It would also indirectly nerf his ult and late game. Right now one of the only ways Pantheon is effective late game is by ulting into the enemy team, and insta-jump-stunning someone. If that turns into ulting into the enemy team and insta-jump-slowing someone it would be significantly worse (think TF ult engage with red card.... not good).

Yeah, I thought about that a bit too. While I think the stun on its own may need some kind of adjustment as I wrote above, I think it does make sense to have the stun guaranteed when used from the ultimate as you describe.

I think the Impale mechanic is a neat idea I just think these changes would "Olaf" or "Evelyn" nerf pantheon. Instead of simply taking his current kit and adding a limiting factor make Impale limit him, but, also, give him bonuses if he uses it correctly. As you wrote it above all you are doing is taking his kit as it is, and putting restrictions on it. You are not giving the pantheon player a reward for properly using Impale. For example, if you get the Q->W combo it could apply a bleed, shred armor,give an empowered auto, convert E to true damage, raise the E passive to 35% health. You could have it grant any number of sucess bonuses. But, instead, it is simply a nerf as it limits what he already has with no compensation. Additionally, the ult problem could be worked around by guaranteeing a stun if Q is used during the animation of W or by adding a guaranteed empowered W after ulting.

I like your point here a lot. I had been contemplating giving some kind of additional reward for retrieving the Q during Impale, regardless of whether he uses W. An empowered auto-attack was along the lines of what I had been thinking initially, but I also like the idea of armor shred or increasing the E passive health threshold. Another thing I had thought about was having a % missing health damage application for using the W on an Impaled target. Doing something to change or empower the E following a successful Q-W might make the most sense, however, as the E is so often used as the followup to the stun--maybe it applies % missing health damage in this situation. Or maybe getting the spear from the Impaled target normally would stun them, while using W on an Impaled target could cause an AoE stun (maybe Jax stun radius?), and as you say, using W after the ultimate would always give an empowered W. This could help in the lategame by allowing Pantheon to get a big multi-man stun and really help set his team up for success.
If the stun were put on a new E, making W more of a dedicated gap-closer, using W on an Impaled target could give the W a much shorter cooldown. Q and W could also have a longer range given the tradeoffs that are involved and the importance of the Q->W->E combo.

I think you had a fun idea to 'correct' a champion that you don't like, but you didn't fully think through the ramifications of your proposed changes on the person playing Pantheon.

Honestly, I may not like Pantheon in his current state, but I want to make him something more fun and interesting for both Pantheon and Pantheon's opponents. My preference in practice would be to adjust the mechanics, see how they feel, and tune up numbers and add onto the changes as necessary. Your feedback has been very valuable and I would be interested to read your response to some of the things I've written here.

I definitely agree that I would like to see the E change, but I don't have anything in mind and it's the least relevant to the problems I was looking to address. I'm certainly open to hearing people's ideas about what the E could be.

The Grounded debuff with Impale could be a good addition, though I'm assuming it should last less time than the Impale itself as 4 second CC of any kind is more DotA territory than League territory (I couldn't find anything on how long Grounded would last for the new Cassio from a quick search). This would make his time to go in really clear, as if Grounded lasted, say, half of Impale, those first two seconds of Impale would be the ideal time for him to go in. That focus might be good, but the downside of this is that if Pantheon has a lot of damage on his opponent it could start to feel a little bit like old Leblanc with the silence on her Q-R-W, where the combination of the speed of the spells, the chained silences, and the damage meant you saw what was coming but you had no chance to do anything but die, even if you would have been capable of flashing out of range fast enough between spells. The difference here is that the right abilities and a fast enough reaction could be used to stop his dash, so it could still work.
Alternatively, Grounded might be interesting to apply on the W when it's not used as a stun so that it helps him hold someone down in melee range more effectively. Or It could be interesting to have it apply when he retrieves his spear from the Impaled status if he doesn't use Aegis of Zeonia to retrieve his spear (he just pulled a spear out of them, it would make sense to have some kind of reaction to that).

If these changes were actually going to be considered, I would probably want to see some playtests in regards to whether he should stun or slow or whatever with Aegis of Zeonia and no Impale. I like the idea of getting the stun from pulling the spear out after a spear throw as a way to start a fight--once he's in the fight with someone I'm not sure if the stun is the way to go. Ralanr mentioned the possibility of Grounded, which I think might be good on the W to help Pantheon prevent his opponents from running. Who knows though, the cooldown might be long enough that the stun would still be appropriate.
I completely agree that the E channel feels clunky. It seems like it's solely intended for use when you've stunned someone with a secondary purpose of helping Pantheon clear waves of minions. I'm pretty uncertain what I would suggest to replace it with, personally, as I'm not trying to revamp the character and his abilities completely--my preference for a lot of the more mechanically complex champions shows through in that a lot of the things that first come to mind to replace Pantheon's E with would likely involve a significant increase in complexity in comparison to his other skills/current E.

I agree with this. OP obviously dislikes Pantheon and the bias has crept into this 'mechanics revision' that is just a series of nerfs. If it was a 'mechanics revision' you would think he would get at least 1 compensatory buff for what is essentially a gutting of his kit. Literally this is just 'let's make his Q, W and indirectly his R worse and give him nothing in return! BRILLIANT!!'

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, particularly as a Pantheon main.

Here's what I'm thinking, essentially: Pantheon's kit is dated and it shows. He has a number of elements to his kit that just don't fit with modern champion design. Being a poke-oriented AD is not a bad thing, but Pantheon's execution of that archetype doesn't really fit the design direction of the rest of the game. Most other champions with decent poking abilities have counterplay involved in their poke--usually, it's a skillshot that can be dodged and that gets blocked by minions. In Zed's case, it's a skillshot that can be dodged and that does significantly less damage to targets after the first... And he also doesn't have a stun on his gap-closer or guaranteed critical chance on his poke when the enemy is low. Annie's Disintegrate is possibly the only skill I can think of that is roughly analogous to Pantheon's Q in that it's a high damage single-target point-and-click spell with good range and a low cooldown. Even then, her base damage is lower at all ranks (though the AP ratio might make up for that, given the price disparity between AP and AD, I'm not certain) and it has a higher starting mana cost that increases as she puts points into it (admittedly mitigated by the mana or mana regen that she's more likely to acquire as an AP champion). She's also set up as more of a burst-engage type than a poking champion, has lower mobility (no escapes and lower movement speed)... And honestly, it wouldn't really surprise me if they changed her Q eventually as well. Gangplank's Q is also similar (much lower base damage, but on-hit and 100% AD scaling instead of bonus), but the bonus gold he gets for killing minions with it has always been a (very minor) reason for him to use it for something other than poking. Also, his rework gave him a lot more things to do with that Q than Pantheon has in any way. Other skills that worked like Pantheon's Q have been turned into skillshots--Veigar's Q, Ryze's Q, Rengar's E to some degree.

Basically, champions with abilities that are point-and-click with high damage and decent range are increasingly uncommon, especially when there's little reason to use that ability for anything but oppressively poking your opponent. There are two approaches that can be taken with that in mind--make the skill a skillshot or go towards the Gangplank route and find a smart way to introduce new gameplay and depth to the offending ability. I imagine the skillshot solution is the first most people jump to (see the other comment guessing that I used all that writing to suggest a skillshot). I am attempting to find another solution that allows Pantheon to keep his Q as a point-and-click ability (even though I may personally prefer a skillshot) while adding windows of opportunity for counterplay.

Also, I think at some level whether a skill is a skillshot or not can be a character fiction based decision, telling the audience something about that character through their gameplay--Pantheon as the Aspect of War does not miss his spear throws because he's a paragon of military skill, while Nidalee has a lot of other life skills going on in addition to throwing spears (like being a cat, hunting traps, etc.) and therefore doesn't have flawless aim. It also seems likely to me that if Pantheon were reworked he may be altered to have a more melee-oriented approach. I say this considering his new lore, which doesn't seem to mention him throwing his spear at all, despite the new Targon lore pieces narratively including some key abilities of the champions involved, like Pantheon's Grand Skyfall and Aegis of Zeonia. I also say this because sitting back and throwing spears until the enemy is weak enough to kill just doesn't really fit the character they seem to be presenting.

Basically, what I'm saying is that Pantheon might not be a melee combatant now, but that may not be true forever. I've taken the position that it won't be. Pantheon as a non-melee combatant is not necessarily a healthy character, even if it's the state he's always been in--a lot of older characters have been reworked for their questionable designs. Also, following that, Pantheon does not have to be overpowered to have unhealthy gameplay. In fact, I kind of think his problems if he doesn't snowball super hard are indicative of some design problems considering that many other early-game oriented champions can still pull their weight reasonably well even if they don't run away with a lead.

As a Pantheon player I thrive on enemies who pick Darius or Fiora vs me and start dorans blade thinking they're going to outbully me. You're not. You cannot. It cannot be done short of a massive failing on Pantheon's part.

As a Fiora player who has abused other Fioras with Pantheon, I know exactly how both ends of that deal feel. :P

Haha, no. Proposing a skillshot is the obvious answer when you think about Pantheon's Q as compared to Ryze's Q or Rengar's E, and I imagine it's been thrown around by a fair few people. I wouldn't bother to write so much if I were just going to propose a skillshot. I'm more interested in finding a way to change Pantheon's play patterns into something with a bit more depth and decision-making than changing the fundamental way that his abilities function. While I certainly wouldn't say I have a solution as good as the Gangplank rework, I would say I took it more in that direction (giving him more things to take into consideration for how he uses his abilities) rather than just patching on a skillshot and calling it a day.