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.
The 26.8 patch preview for League of Legends is out. A small handful of buffs and nerfs were announced ahead of the full release next week. From @RiotPhroxon on X Source
Viego Buffs are now “delayed”
Patch 26.8 Update
1. We have pulled Viego from the patch after reviewing some of the data issues from yesterday that led us to want to buff him in the first place. There's a bit of weirdness that happens with his data, due to some of the form swapping that goes on and how that…
– In line with the fantasy fulfilment I was talking about yesterday, Hwei changes are leaning into his identity as a combo mage
– It is a cool pattern and in particular, this set of changes skews him more towards being effective in mid lane compared to bot lane with the level scaling
– We’re not opposed to him being viable in bot lane, but pushing him towards midlane
– We think this makes Hwei more uniquely satisfying compared to say having his damage come from predominantly single QQ, QW or QE casts
– We separated some of Mel’s damage output in 26.3 by creating a separation between her first initial hit and the subsequent hits
– We’re reducing how much value she gets from this initial Q landing and backloading the damage more to give her damage more counterplay
– We still think we need to do more work to Mel long term
– (ARAM) Another note here is that we’ve been investigating some ARAM specific changes to Mel, since her reflect can be harder to play against in that mode, given the narrowness of the play area
– We recently discovered a Yuumi bug where her ultimate was healing her attached ally each time it heals another ally
– While the number of times you’re hitting multiple people with ult are rare, it is a significant nerf to the healing in the best case
– We’re fixing this bug and compensating the ultimate (and other sources of healing)
Future Changes Philosophy
A lot of the direction of our changes in the near future are aimed at emphasizing the unique strengths/strategic differentiators of champions.Eeven if it will cost some aspect of the champion being flat in winrate across skill levels.
In many ways, a champion that has lost resonance with a core portion of their user base, even if they can sit at a higher power level may represent a downgrade in experience for players of that champion.
Expect the buffs this patch to translate more of the power budget into the area of the champions that are unique to them, and we want to be moving the power of the roster like this over time.
