BasicallyMogar

https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-gb/news/dev/champion-insights-vex/

Vex’s original gameplay, designed by Nathan “Lutzburg” Lutz, created portals that extended the distance allied missiles traveled. You’d essentially have Miss Fortune ults that went double distance, Blitzcrank hooks from out of nowhere, and all these other really scary, but really cool experiences. Except there was one problem: It cost multiple years of VFX budget.

That’s not an exaggeration. Nearly every missile ability in League needed to be completely redone with updated VFX just to interact with Vex’s kit. And that just wasn’t feasible.

Y'all were close, but no the tech was not done.

Specifically, anything that increases how long a missile lives in the world requires us to redo all the VFX. So there's a lot of possible missile manipulation we can still do, but there are some strange limits that don't exist for any real player-facing reason but are actually hard limits we won't be able to bypass.

sabrio204

It really feels like Riot hates shields sometimes, since over the years we ended up having less sword-and-board characters.

Poppy was reworked to lose her shield, and same for Taric.

Pantheon was on my short list of champions I wanted to personally update specifically because I love shield fighters. But yeah we haven't done a lot with them.

Spideraxe30

Hey Axes I recall you mentioning in the dev video that you experimented with Panth throwing his spear and using a short sword until he picked it up again, could you share why you cut that idea since it seemed like it could work his shield

That's a deep cut...

Ultimately a thematic thing. We wanted to capture a hoplite in a phalanx as much as possible given he's a single character. Swapping between weapons is a different fantasy.

The gameplay associated also didn't reaaallly pan out. There was some cool stuff like throwing the spear, having it stick in the ground, then shield bashing enemies onto the spear, but it was way too difficult in practice, much cooler in theory than it was in game.

Could definitely still be something there, but ultimately it wasn't Pantheon.