Good news to Pantheon-mains both new and old! Pantheon, the Artisan of War, is next in line to receive a complete visual and gameplay update in League of Legends that will make the old Spartan relevant again.
While Pantheon is still a moderately popular champion, the way he plays and the way his mechanics work makes him seem like a fish out of water given the current League of Legends meta. His skills are outdated, his character model is old and cartoon-y, and anything that Pantheon can do, other champions simply do better. It’s not his fault, of course. Pantheon has been long overdue for a rework.
Since League of Legends launched ten years ago in 2009, Riot Games has made literally thousands of changes. New champions with new abilities have been introduced, hundreds of new items have been released and possibly just as many have been retired, and today League of Legends looks and feels like a completely different game from what it was when it first started.
However, despite the multitude of changes to the game, it feels that a handful of its champions were getting left behind. Pantheon is one of those champions - despite some balance tweaks here and there and some re-texturing every now and then, Pantheon is more or less who he was in 2009. And that’s not a good thing considering all the new stuff they’ve put into the game since then. Back in 2009, there was no such thing as “knock-up” effects, there were only a handful of area-of-effect crowd-control abilities, and almost everybody had non-skillshot targeted skills.
Pantheon, the Artisan of War, used to be one of the most popular champions to play, and I personally remember scoring my very first pentakill with a glass-cannon Pantheon powered by the now-reworked Athene’s Unholy Grail. But with the newer, flashier, and often times, much stronger abilities and metas that League currently has to offer, it seems Pantheon no longer has a place in competitive League of Legends. Hopefully, the upcoming Pantheon VGU will change all of that, and bring the Artisan of War back to the arena of battle, instead of watching from the bleachers.
