Pantheon (Destiny)

by someotherguy, Hertfordshire, England, Thursday, August 06, 2015, 16:19 (3188 days ago) @ CyberKN

While I dislike Cauldron like any self-respecting Guardian, I actually feel like Pantheon has to take the crown for "Worst Map".

Where Cauldron feels like a good idea (circular map with easy rotation, horizontal symmetry and interesting lines of sight) executed poorly, Pantheon feels like a bad idea from the get-go.

A lot of this is because of the spawn areas. Based on the heatmaps Bungie provided, the two self-contained spawn areas make up 70% of the map. That's enormous! Literally 70% of the map is partitioned off from the main play space for respawns. And because they're so huge, it's very difficult to flip the spawns.

Now you might think "Well at least it's a symmetrical map, so you don't need to flip spawns often". Most of the time, yes, you intentionally flip the spawns for a strategic advantage. But the real purpose of spawn flipping is to prevent spawn camping. It prevents an enemy team from sitting outside your spawn and picking you off as you spawn in. It doesn't always work perfectly, especially in 12-man games where things can get a little hectic, but for the most part if the enemy rushes your spawn, you spawn somewhere else, hopefully out of harm's way.

Compare that to Pantheon, where the spawn areas are large enough that you can have people literally capturing your home Control Point and still spawn there. In some cases that can be quite convenient, but not when they're also packing an LMG, or when there's more than one of them.

What's worse, the spawn areas are partitioned, with only 3 ways out into the main play space. even worse still, all three routes are fantastic sniper lanes and grenade chokepoints, and two of them require you to come around a blind corner. What this means is that almost every single game of Clash or Control on Pantheon turns into a game of "Trap them in their spawn and pick them off as they try to leave".

And after all that, my personal favourite - the 15 second walk of shame. After every death you respawn at the back of your enormous spawn area, and have to sprint for 15 seconds before you can even make another attempt at breaking out. If you die just 10 times in a game on Pantheon, you've spent 2 and a half minutes walking out of your spawn. Incredibly frustrating in Clash (especially with Heavy Ammo inbound), but downright unbearable in Control where the enemy can easily neutralise and/or capture Point B in the time it takes to respawn and get back to the fight. Yuck.

Strangely, Pantheon is actually a pretty good map for 3v3, probably because it's much harder to lock down all three lanes with only 3 people and players tend to stick together more.

Tl;Dr - Pantheon's needlessly large spawns and poorly placed chokepoints encourage spawn camping, making it uniquely awful for 6v6.