User blog comment:Lokiwg/Pantheon/@comment-9048637-20131106202030

I see where you're coming from, but I'm not sure I entirely agree. To my mind, Pantheon can be played effectively either as a full assassin or as a bruisy fighter. Let's talk briefly about both.

Assassin Panth has the a lot of things going for him: one hell of an entrance post-6, a truckload of damage, and easy-mode tower dives. His problem is that he falls off a lot harder than some assassins, mostly because he has no escapes and a fairly long cooldown on the majority of his burst (that is, his E) with no way of resetting it. To look at your comparison examples: Kha'Zix's burst rests mainly upon his Q, which has an absurdly short cooldown particularly with CDR; he also has his leap, which once he's evolved it means he can jump onto a vulnerable target, burst them down, then reposition with ease. Rengar, similarly, gets basically all his burst from his Q, which has again a rather short cooldown; alright, his ability to reposition after a kill depends very much on where the fight's occurring, but he at least has his W to improve his survivability amid a group of enemies. And Eve, finally, has most of her damage coming from her spammable Q and her auto-attacks. She also has a cooldown-resetting repositioning tool, and... well, she's just generally Eve. 'Nuff said.

Am I saying Assassin Panth isn't viable? No, but he is going to fall off, and fall off hard, unless he basically transitions into a sub-par version of bruiser Mantheon. Maybe that's fine, but it's a consideration you have to take into account.

As for bruiser Mantheon: I feel you're coming at this from the wrong angle, somewhat. You're comparing him to a bunch of very high damage bruisers with excellent sustain, which he's not. What bruiser Mantheon excels at is peeling: targeted, gap-closing stun on a relatively (for what it is) short cooldown, need I say more? That's not to say that bruiser Mantheon won't deal good damage, because he will, assuming you haven't built him stupidly. On that note, though, I think I should talk a bit about building bruiser Mantheon. I feel that 'assassin Panth + an extra survivability item' is the wrong way to go (not saying that's what you're doing, but if anyone is doing that...). As you correctly point out, Pantheon has relatively little going for him by way of defensive steroids. He does, on the other hand, have excellent AD scalings. See, this is the thing that everyone seems to get about good scalings in general: yes, they mean that you get a lot out of stacking that stat in abundance, but the thing is, you also get a lot out of only building only a bit of it and then spending the rest of your item slots rectifying your weaknesses. For Mantheon, this means spending one or two slots on big AD items, probably focusing on armour pen to make the most out of his excellent bases, and then devoting the rest to survivability. You then have tanky, hard-peeling bruiser who's still putting out respectable levels of damage.

On that note, I think the best comparison for bruiser Mantheon is actually Darius. Like Darius, he scales excellently with AD; like Darius, he has very good peel; and, like Darius, he should be built on the tanky side of bruiser so that he can stay in fights for as long as possible.

That's my take, anyway. Feel free to disagree; I invite stimulating debate.