Well 2 or 3 UB with Staff of renewal can be difficult especially when they go straight for towers.

Ultimately you're talking about a very short amount of time. As dragonfang88 points out soon most will have all the items they need.  Seeing how each of us can only take one item all anyone really needs to be compitive is 1-5 or so good favor items. 

The rest is just gravey/more options.  The persistance factor gives you a goal/want/need to keep playing beyond the sake of just for the game itself; something I enjoy.

@HorseRadish, that sounds like a need to nerf/balance/tweak Staff of Renewal -or- UB's abilities.

chosing your favor item is a strategic choice! they totally have their place in the game. With favor items, you can complete a build, or react to what you see in the opposing team. So, no please don't touch the favor items.

There are bots in ranked matches.. Kinda hard to see a game as competative with AI. :/

I strongly feel Favor Items should stay in Pantheon, they are an important part of this game. If you hate playing with them, maybe you should find a few Favor Item stats you enjoy and figure a way to use them to your advantage.

Yet another thread of noobs complaining about favor items. 

I've played with horse radish.  He may be cocky and annoying, but he's no noob.  Favor items as persistent rewards are just bad for competitive play.  If you don't understand why, then you're the noob.

yes the swift anklet and the mana items should be reworked

In competitive play, everyone's soon going to have fair game to all favor items, so they aren't really bad for competitive play.

They open up some early combos that might be tough to deal with, but that's just strategy, not bad game design.

Available after X number of games played isn't acceptable.  If the threshold is low, it's pointless and unfair to players who are just starting out.  If the threshold is high, it's unfair to anyone who hasn't played the game for a long time.  There isn't going to be a middle ground where it's fair to everyone, the best you can hope for is unfair to new players but not a pointless mechanic.  In demigod, the threshold isn't as low as you think.  As a rough estimate, you'll get around 100 favor a game average.  Also as a rough estimate, the average favor item cost is around 1000.  That's going to be about 10 games to get any given favor item.  There are 28 favor items.  You're looking at well over 250 games to get all of them.  That's a lot of games to be able to play whatever style you want and counter your opponent in whatever way you need to.  Granted, not all the favor items are useful, some of them don't even work as advertised, but you can't really know that until you try them out and then you've already spent your favor.

all favour items should be available from beginning for all players from a competitive standpoint of play - oh and need some balance love, some are just useless while others affect the game too much for a single item.

Dude, HorseRadish was the top beta player.

I agree with HorseRadish that multiple UB with lowered recharge time spitting on towers is a seriously OP tactic. There are other Favor item OP tricks available and no doubt more will come. Some of these give unfair advantage in the early game where it often matters the most and can sometimes decide the game pretty much before it has even started.

As Pantheon is essentially random (or at least supposed to be that way) getting a bad match-up of DGs can spell utter doom with Favor items on. Also note that having access to the same Favor items doesn't solve the problem as they combo very differently with different DGs.

Now, I'm not quite sure how the dilemma could be resolved other than disallowing Favor items from ranked games.