A fan-made Aurelion Sol skin inspired by legendary Pokémon Rayquaza has been turning heads on social media. Many fans have taken to social media to beg the Riot Games Skin team for similar concepts in future. Could we see a branded skin line come to LoL in future?
The skin, created by artist Nyth and shared via Runeforge, reimagines Aurelion Sol with Rayquaza’s iconic green serpentine design, complete with fiery orange energy trails. The skin echoes the sky dragon’s Delta Stream aesthetic. The thematic fit is hard to argue with. Both are ancient, godlike dragons that rule the skies, and that overlap gives the concept a natural home in Aurelion Sol’s skin catalogue.
The timing of the concept is interesting, given recent comments from Stephanie Leung, Lead for League of Legends Cosmetics, who confirmed in an interview that fan ideas genuinely do make it into the game. “Some of our more successful skins over the last year or so were ideas born from the community,” Leung said, pointing to Train Conductor Ornn as a recent example. She added that Riot tries to take the core idea and fantasy and reimagine it through their own lens rather than lifting a concept wholesale.
Aurelion Sol is also exactly the kind of champion Leung described as a priority for getting the right skin. For champions with longer gaps between releases, the team aims to make sure whatever skin they receive next feels worth the wait. Whether this particular concept ever finds its way onto Riot’s mood boards remains to be seen, but as fan pitches go, this one makes a strong case for itself.
Note that custom skins are not banned by Riot Games, with some streamers using them. However, if Riot Vanguard notices it, it can trigger a ban. In that case, it’s unlikely you will get the ban undone.
League of Legends Arena is a huge part of the game now, and the game mode is about to get a level up in the next patch. More specifically, the augments will get a level up while you play, giving you new options to improve in Arena.
Level up Augments
Augments can now level up, with stats scaling at each level. The cards display the current stat value, upgrading to the new value (shown as X > Y). At level 3, these Augments will take on a final form, gaining a new trait.
You can see an example below with the Lazer Eyes Augment:
Laser Eyes:
Base: Fires a continuous magic damage laser in the direction you’re facing
Lv.2 (2 stars): Laser Length 600.00 >> 800.00
Lv.3 (3 stars): Laser Length 630.00 >> 1000.00, and at max level gains a new passive – deals 1% increased damage every 0.5 seconds the enemy stays in your sights
Riot also shared a few other updates, though not as specific, which were:
Quantum Computing: Causes your auto cast augments to multicast
Magical Girl: Drops more stars on your enemies during your magical transformation
Other Arena Changes
Season 2 will see a number of big changes to the arena, alongside the new level-up feature.
Events
A new rotating Events system introduces limited-time format variations each patch. Season 2 launches with four of them: No Event (standard format, giving players time to adjust to the new changes), 3×6 (three players per team across six teams total, opening up comps that struggle in the traditional 2v2 format), Bravery (random champion mode with a curated pool option for those who want some choice), and Swift Arena (two teams of four with faster rounds and more consistent matchups against the same opponents).
Two Map Changes
Petricite Grove is a brand new map set on the outskirts of Demacia. It features larger walls, more hiding spots, and scattered mining bombs that players can knock into enemies for heavy damage. Immobilising effects detonate them instantly, creating burst combo potential for CC-heavy champions.
Ancestral Woods has been reworked. It keeps its identity as the smallest map but drops the single central Power Flower in favor of perimeter Power Flowers and a new Bulwark Blossom in the centre. Last-hitting the Bulwark Blossom grants a heal and shield that scales up when your team is outnumbered.
New Augments
Over 30 new augments are being added this season. Some highlights include Transmute, which immediately fills your remaining augment slots with Silver augments on selection; Wild Fire, an auto-cast fireball that bounces between enemies and bounces endlessly at max level; Scavenger, which lets you steal a defeated opponent’s augment after each elimination but locks your future offerings to level-ups only; and Magical Girl, which summons a falling star at the start of each combat that knocks back nearby enemies before raining stars down on opponents.
Riot Games has announced a hard-ranked reset for all Master, Grandmaster, and Challenger players in NA, EUW, EUNE, BR, LAN, and TR when Patch 26.9 goes live at the start of Season 2.
Every player currently sitting in Master tier or above in those regions will have their visible rank and MMR wiped back to Master 0 LP. No LP will be carried over.
Why Is Riot Doing This?
Since the start of season one, and to Riot Games’ own admission, they made a series of mistakes configuring the Ranked system at the start of the 2026 season, and the resulting patch-to-patch instability meant LP gains were inconsistent enough to undermine ladder integrity. Players were bouncing between +10/-30 LP and +/-20 LP depending purely on which patch they played on.
Riot has stated that the underlying matchmaking issues have since been resolved as of Patch 26.6, but the existing ranked ladder no longer reflects player skill. As a result, and with no other option available, they are taking drastic action.
When surveyed, Apex-tier players in the affected regions said they prioritised ladder integrity above everything else, even at the cost of fair matchmaking in the short term. A hard reset was the result.
What Changes With the Reset?
Beyond wiping ranks back to Master 0 LP, Riot is also adjusting LP gains and cutoffs:
Baseline LP gains and losses move to +/-30 LP
Expected range sits between +35/-25 LP and +25/-35 LP
Challenger minimum LP cutoff increases to 800 LP
Grandmaster minimum LP cutoff increases to 400 LP
Riot is clear that matchmaking quality will take a hit in the short term. With no memory of previous ranks in the system, you could see five ex-Challengers matched against five ex-Masters and have it register as a fair game. That shakeout period is expected to last several months.
Hey folks. As a result of the volatility since January, we’re doing a Ranked reset for Apex players (Master+) in NA, EUW, EUNE, BR, LAN, and TR. Affected players will have their visible rank and MMR reset to Master 0LP when Patch 26.9 goes live.
Because the reset lands mid-year and shortens the effective Season 2 climb, Riot is adjusting how rewards work. Season 1 rewards will be distributed as normal, with the changes not affecting them, as this was Riot’s mistake. Season 2 rewards for Apex-tier players in the affected regions will be reconciled at the end of Season 3. The higher of your Season 2 or Season 3 peak rank counts for both.
Patch 26.9 does not yet have a confirmed release date, but it falls in the standard two-week patch cycle.
The 26.9 patch preview for League of Legends is out. It’s a bigger patch this time around, as the game prepares for Season 2. While only six champions are being directly buffed or nerfed, there are lots of changes to other champions, systems, and much more. From @RiotPhroxon on X Source
– After being out for almost a year and a half, we’ve learnt a lot about Ambessa’s power curves, strengths and weaknesses, good and bad matchups, etc.
– One area we feel has slightly less counterplay than we think is long term healthy is Ambessa’s ult warning
– Given its long cast range, it often feels more missable (burden is on the caster) than dodgeable (counterplay for user)
– We played around with several timings and think this timing strikes the best balance between dodgeability, requirement to combo CC and still satisfaction for the Ambessa player
– The goals of these changes are to increase differentiation between the AP and AD builds
– Create satisfying incentives for Shyv players who want to be more of a durable Dragon, rather than a squishy burst champion
– It’s also been a common pain point that Shyv’s shield is both easily popped and having the Movespeed tied to that makes her play pattern quite binary and unsatisfying in the moment, so we’re making the Movespeed from W more consistent and available
– In the AD build, we’re looking to have the Q + W pattern be more supported, as she needs to stick onto targets more and be more durable (W cooldown should help here)
– In this build, we’re looking to balance the satisfaction of Q button presses and repeatedly attacking
– We’ve also added more incentives for her Sheen synergies with Trinity Force in particular by buffing her AD growth
– While she’s lost a few incentives to build AD overall, we intend to support the AD Bruiser oriented build as best as we can
– In the AP build, we’re looking to create stronger incentives for E to be maxed and play around E + W
– More of a fireball oriented in and out pattern
– We’ll continue to followup to ensure that Shyvana’s tuning supports her builds as they play out
– While Zeri has been statistically balanced in her more bursty form, especially across ranks, her satisfaction and identity have taken a hit
– These changes are aimed at trading off some of her damage output to re-emphasize her speed outputs (some of the main reasons players play her)
– Along with this are some feelsgood changes (like E refunding on attacks vs everything)
– While we’re increasing some of the speed on her ultimate, we’ll keep an eye on the stack dropoff duration to ensure it strikes the right balance of fantasy fulfilment and balanceability
– We overnerfed Tahm Kench last patch; we intended to buff TK support overall and these buffs are more skewed there, though they will overall affect both roles
Season 2 at a glance
When approaching 26.9, we were thinking a lot about systems and champion spaces that needed satisfaction, strategic distinction and also opportunities to create surface area for excitement and dreaming of what’s possible.
The first place we were looking was in enabling certain types of systemic gameplay patterns, where they were a little under the mark.
Doran’s Bow is an option in greedy lanes where you trade off health (and are more susceptible to burst), but if you have high uptime on an opponent
Doran’s Helm is intended to be a situational choice (though some might be hardbound) for champions who don’t need the sustain from Doran’s Shield in lane
We’re hoping that these changes allow players to eke out even more advantages in certain lanes and add a little more depth to laning interactions
Major Item Changes
Statikk Shiv
AD On-Hits have been languishing for a while and Statikk Shiv presented an opportunity to take an item that not many champions used and add some spice to it (the lightning applying on-hits)
Since some of the more eye-popping examples, we’ve made some changes to remove Staikk Shiv’s on-hit lightning also impacting the primary target (so it will only apply off th einitial attack
While it’s possible this may not be sustainable in the long term, pushing the frontier of innovation also carries some risk, so we want to see where it goes
We’re excited to see some interesting cooking and new builds!
Deathfire Touch, Stormraiders and Comet
This philosophy also presented an opportunity within the keystone mastery system.
Comet has been overloaded for a while, serving the DoT mage class, albeit poorly, and it also tries to compete with Aery on this axis.
We saw an opportunity to bring back an old favorite in Deathfire Touch, and this archetype of poke champion is no longer so oppressive in the modern game.
This allowed us to make a change to Comet to make it more about long-range poke, while also opening up Deathfire Touch as a more sustained option.
We hope this differentiation allows the Keystones to play a more differentiated role.
At the same time, Phase Rush has been hard to balance, especially for Control Mages who often use a few low-damage spell instances to run away and play a spacing game.
We felt that the Design of Stormraider’s Surge was just superior to Phase Rush and represented the right level of commitment to allow the Movespeed to be powerful.
Historically, we had to overly nerf Phase Rush to the point of being unsatisfying for the majority of the roster, while still being too good on the champs that could proc it too freely.
Season 2 brings a wave of new items across keystones, boots, and starter choices. Here’s a breakdown of everything coming to the Rift.
Keystones
Stormraider’s Surge Dealing 25% of a champion’s maximum health within 3s grants 40% Move Speed and 50% Slow Resistance for 3s. Move Speed is 75% effective for ranged champions. Cooldown: 20s – 10s
Deathfire Touch Damaging a champion with an ability burns them for 1–10 based on level (+0.03 AP)(+0.08 bonus AD) adaptive damage per second. After burning for 3 seconds, the burn damage increases by 100% while they remain on fire.
4s SingleTarget – 2sArea of Effect – 1sDamage over Time
Starting Items
Doran’s Bow – 400g – Fast Auto Attack Item
+6 Attack Damage +15% Attack Speed +1.5% Omnivamp
Doran’s Helm – 450g – Resistances
+110 Health +10 Armor +10 Magic Resist
Helping Hand – Attacks deal 5 bonus physical damage to minions.
Boots
Gluttonous Greaves – 950g – Stacking Omnivamp
+45 Move Speed +4% Omnivamp Slay – Gain 1% Omnivamp on Champion takedown, stacking up to 6 times.
Immortal Path – 950g – Drain Tank
(Only Mid Lane) Locked until Quest is Completed
+45 Move Speed +4% Omnivamp Slay – Gain 1% Omnivamp on Champion takedown, stacking up to 6 times.
Now and Forever – While above half Health, deal 5% increased damage. While below half Health, gain 15% increased healing, shielding, and regeneration.
Riot is overhauling Arena for Season 2 with a new map, a reworked map, a brand new Augment leveling system, rotating game mode Events, and over 20 new Guests of Honor. Here’s everything coming to the mode.
Events: A Rotating Twist Each Patch
The headline addition this season is Events, limited-time variations that replace the standard eight teams of two format and shake up how Arena plays. Season 2 will have four of them.
No Event kicks things off. The first patch is intentionally left vanilla so players can adjust to the new map, augments, and Guests of Honor before the chaos begins.
3×6 swaps to three players per team across six total teams. The goal is champion diversity. A lot of champions that struggle in the traditional 2v2 format get significantly more viable when you can build around them properly. Whether that’s a Kog’Maw comp with a real frontliner or a full deathball of bruisers.
Bravery is the random-champion mode players have been requesting since Arena launched. In champ select, you get a random champion button and a small pool of curated options if full random isn’t your thing. It rewards adaptability and flexibility over champion mastery.
Swift Arena goes back to two teams of four but compresses the time commitment. Rounds come faster, and because you fight the same teams more consistently, reading your opponents becomes a bigger part of the game.
Two Map Changes
Petricite Grove (New)
A brand new map set on the outskirts of Demacia. The grove has larger walls with more hiding spots, and its defining feature is scattered mining bombs that can be knocked into enemies for heavy damage. Hit one with an immobilizing effect, and it detonates instantly, which opens up some creative burst combos for champions with CC.
Ancestral Woods (Reworked)
Ancestral Woods keeps its identity as the smallest Arena map, but loses the single central Power Flower setup. Riot acknowledged this wasn’t a great design. The rework adds Power Flowers around the perimeter of the map and places a new Bulwark Blossom in the centre. Last-hitting the Bulwark Blossom grants a large heal and shield, with the effect scaling up when your team is outnumbered. New brush and terrain around the sides also create more room for cat-and-mouse play while waiting for a teammate to respawn.
Augment Levels
The biggest systemic change to Arena this season is the introduction of Augment Levels. After selecting two levelable augments, future augment offerings will include the option to level an existing augment rather than take a new one. Leveling augments makes them stronger and, in some cases, unlocks entirely new effects.
Augments will now be offered more frequently overall, giving you the choice between taking something new, leveling something you already have, or replacing an augment with a higher-tier version. You can still only hold four augments at a time in most situations.
Round 8 also introduces a new Crafting Round, where you can either gain an extra augment slot or remove an augment to level one of your remaining ones. This gives you a mid-to-late game pivot point to reshape your build around what’s actually working.
New Augments
Over 30 new augments are coming to Arena this season. A few highlights:
Transmute: Silver fills all your remaining augment slots with Silver augments immediately on selection. Taking it early is a strong setup for the leveling system since you get a head start on stacking augments to level up while others are still building their kits.
Wild Fire: Autocasts a fireball that bounces between nearby enemy champions. Leveling it increases the number of bounces, and at the max level, it bounces endlessly. It works as both a burn source and an auto-cast trigger, bridging two separate build archetypes.
Scavenger: lets you steal one of your defeated opponent’s augments each time you eliminate a team. The trade-off is that your future augment offerings are locked to level-ups only, so you are committing to whatever you pick up along the way.
Magical Girl: summons a falling star at the start of each combat. Catching it knocks back nearby enemies during a transformation animation, then empowers you and rains stars down on opponents. Pure fun.
Arena is set for some big changes in Season 2, with Riot Games clearly looking to double down on the amount of other things League of Legends players can do.
Patch 26.8 is set to add a number of new skins to the game with PsyOps Vladimir, PROJECT: Sivir, Space Groove Zac and the special, PROJECT: Command Line Master Yi. The first three will also all get a selection of chromas for the new skins.
Patch 26.8 Skins
PsyOps Vladimir
PROJECT: Sivir
Space Groove Zac
PROJECT: Command Line Master Yi
The new Yi skins take the classic Legendary skin and make it a Mythic skin. However, it will not get a full refresh in terms of animations.
Old:
Yi Idle
Sylas Project recall
Project Pyke “Snake”
PROJECT Yi auto attack
No double strike crit animation
New:
Some new auto attacks
Unique Ultimate movement
New Icon
Sword changes after each double strike
A few audio changes
Victorious Braum
Players that get 15 ranked wins during season 1 will also get the new Victorious Braum.
After months of playtesting and refinement, Riot Games is finally bringing WASD controls to Ranked play with the launch of Season 2 in patch 26.9. Here’s a full breakdown of what’s changing, what’s been tuned, and what new options are available to all players
WASD Is Ranked-Ready
The two benchmarks Riot set for themselves were simple. WASD shouldn’t be overpowered, and win-rate differences between control schemes should be minimal. According to the dev team, both criteria have been met. Point and Click still holds a slight advantage in win-rate, but the gap is narrow enough that Riot is comfortable with the rollout, and they expect it to close further as players develop WASD mastery.
To back up the numbers, Riot also ran blind sentiment surveys, asking players to rate their lane opponent’s skill level and guess what control scheme they were using. The result? Players were largely unable to tell the difference. That’s a strong signal that WASD isn’t producing obviously robotic or exploitable movement patterns at the competitive level.
What Got Polished Before Ranked
Pathfinding Near Walls
One of the biggest friction points with WASD is walking directly into terrain. Unlike Point and Click, where your champion automatically routes around obstacles, WASD movement is immediate and directional. Riot spent significant time calibrating how champions slide along curves versus stop at hard walls.
A key quality-of-life fix: when your camera is panned away from your champion, WASD pathfinding now automatically routes around all walls rather than letting you clip and get stuck. No more thinking you’re en route to a gank only to find your jungler wedged in the blue buff alcove.
Auto-Attack Follow-Up Logic
Some abilities, like Tristana’s Explosive Charge, are designed to automatically queue an auto-attack afterwards. With WASD, that “locked-in” auto can feel punishing since attacks can’t be cancelled mid-animation. Riot went through dozens of champion abilities and toggled this behaviour on or off per ability when WASD is active. This was based on what felt right in practice.
A long-requested feature is finally arriving: you can now set different keybinds on a per-champion basis, for both Point and Click and WASD. This includes ability hotkeys, smart cast toggles, and more. Rumble and Viktor players, especially, will want to head into the Practice Tool before their next game.
New Accessibility Options
The input system overhaul opened the door to several new accessibility features:
Move the cursor with custom inputs: the most-requested accessibility feature is now live for everyone.
Joystick support: WASD can be remapped to joystick inputs for accessibility-oriented controllers. Full controller support is still not planned, but this covers the gap for many players.
Rotate WASD with map orientation: pressing W will now move you up-right, and S will move you down-left along the lane direction. Handy for laptop players with limited simultaneous key inputs.
Expanded keybinding freedom: MB1 (left mouse button) can now be freely rebound inside League’s options menu, and all keyboard keys except Delete and Escape are available.
Split mouse interaction options: Select Object, Interact with Object, Auto Attack, and Cast Ability are now separate, individually bindable actions instead of one shared input.
Bugs Worth Knowing About (Now Fixed)
A few memorable ones from development: Syndra was pathfinding around her own orbiting spheres, causing a subtle wiggle on straight-line movement. Aphelios could auto-attack an enemy exactly once while dead, if Infernum was equipped and specific conditions were met. And Warwick could drift in arbitrary directions mid-Jaws of the Beast dash if a directional input was held. All have been resolved.
You can check out lots of cool images and GIFs on the official Riot Games post that goes over the WASD changes.
Patch 26.8 notes for League of Legends are here. (Source)
Patch Highlights
Systems
Ranked Season 1 End
The Summoner’s Rift Ranked Season 1 will end on the last day of patch 26.08 cycle, so if you’ve got ranked goals for this season make sure you hit them this patch! Good luck!
Date and Time: Regional local server time midnight (23:59:59) on April 28.
Summoner’s Rift Ranked Season 2 will start on the first day of patch 26.09 cycle.
Date and Time: Regional local server time noon (12:00:00) on April 29.
A few additional things to keep in mind as we wrap up this season:
For all regions, Ranked mission (win 15 ranked games) will be reset with the Season 2 start.
End of S1 ranked reward will be granted on 26.09.
Shard transfer services will be temporarily disabled during season transition until the reward grant is completed.
Champion Specific Keybinds
Champion specific keybinds have arrived! This long awaited player request will go live this patch and will now allow for champion specific overrides to be set for most keybinds. Rumble and Viktor players rejoice, smartcast options can also be toggled on a per-champion basis.
As a heads up, you won’t be able to do this out of game, so make sure you go into practice tool and set them up before jumping into ranked!
Discord Integration
We’re partnering with Discord to make it easier to get into your next League of Legends game with your friends. Linking your accounts unlocks new social features:
Invite Discord friends straight to your party, no alt-tabbing needed!
Copy a party link and share it in your favorite server, no more manually inviting friends one by one.
See which of your friends play other Riot games and jump into parties faster.
We’ll be running a Beta across US, Canada and Brazil starting on April 14th. We will continue to test and refine the experience and plan on expanding to additional regions in a few patches.
Dr. Mundo has been able to more consistently reach his high points in the jungle where he is less concerned about his slow early game. We are looking to curb some of his clear speed to make sure he can’t go where he pleases too quickly and requires some more time to scale up.
Hwei has remained on the weaker side since the nerfs to his waveclear last year, and we are fixing a bug that we expect to be a further minor nerf. We still believe those waveclear nerfs to be correct as we want Hwei League’s coolest combo mage, not just a walking waveclear machine. Therefore, we’re buffing his combo casting output up through his passive.
Last patch we made some changes to Karma to reduce how generically powerful she was by reducing her midgame shield strength. Unfortunately those weren’t as effective as we had intended so we’re taking another swing at Karma by directly targeting her E power and reducing her base stats a tad so she is more reliant on skillful and intentional ability usage.
Our favorite bouncing deer has been a bit less than enthusiastic to prance from camp to camp as of late, it’s a scary jungle out there. We’re hoping to give Lillia players some more courage to bring her into the jungle by increasing her ability to have her high move speed translate into a faster clear.
Lucian has a unique role as an AD Carry that dashes in, out of, and around fights which is why many of his players enjoy him. Unfortunately, he hasn’t been doing that as effectively recently so we’re looking to remedy that. To get there, we’re lowering both the cooldown and mana cost of his dashes.
Since our recent adjustments to Mel, she’s been hitting too hard with her initial Q missile whether ahead or behind, even as opponents dodge the rest of the spell, so we’re looking to take her damage down a notch. We’re also aiming to reduce how frustrating her W can be by lowering the bonus mobility she gets and the spell’s uptime, with the movespeed now matching her shield and reflect duration.
As a champ in both Top and Support, Tahm Kench requires periodic maintenance as the meta shifts to ensure both roles of his roles are equally supported. In this case, Dusk and Dawn’s addition to the game this season has shifted this balance in favor of top lane, so we’re adjusting how his passive scales to help balance him out.
Passive – An Acquired Taste
Damage: 6 – 48 (Levels 1 – 11) (+1.5% AP per 100 Bonus HP) (+4.5% Bonus HP) ⇒ 5 – 60 (Levels 1 – 12) (+1.25% AP per 100 Bonus HP) (+4% Bonus HP)
We’re implementing a couple bugfixes to Yuumi’s ultimate, one of which will sometimes result in the magical cat outputting significantly more healing than she may have grown used to. As such, we’re throwing her a FISH by increasing her base healing and best friend healing to provide a stronger baseline effect.
Since the dawn of time Zyra’s have been accidentally putting a point into W and effectively doing nothing level 1. Well no more! We’re adding a small QoL change so Zyra can no longer put her first skill point into W to prevent this type of situation from being a thorn in your side and mental blooming.
