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.
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.
League of Legends patch 26.7 is adding the fun to ARAM Mayhem. With a number of April Fool’s Day-specific changes coming to the popular twist on ARAM. The patch will also make a number of balance changes to the game mode, though only one champion change this time around, and that’s for Shyvana.
The update will go live on April 1st, alongside patch 26.7, so strap in for a few weeks of chaos on the ARAM Mayhem bridge.
This patch focuses on reducing frustration around Augments and champion quality of life.
For Poro Blaster, we’ve adjusted its knockback behavior to be less punishing for melee champions. It will now only knock back once when you have 5 Poros, and we’ve reduced the respawn timer to keep the action flowing. We’ve also made a small adjustment to Void Rift to make its periodic damage less overwhelming.
Augment Changes
Poro Blaster
(NEW) Knocks back enemies once only when you have 5 poros.
Poro respawn time: 5s ⇒ 3.5s
Void Rift
Added 0.75-second cooldown per target.
April Fool’s ARAM Mayhem Changes
Vengeful Poros
Poros now use their muscular arms to move and attack players who hoard poro snax, dealing 1 true damage repeatedly until one of them gets fed.
Cheerful Poros
A Poro (or Wharf Rat) will welcome players in chat at game start.
Poro Snax
Poro Snax now visually look like cheeseburgers.
Flash
Flash leaves behind an emoting afterimage.
Healthbar Scaling
Healthbars scale with champion size.
Turrets
Turrets flash Mastery when they kill a champion and use an emote when destroyed. Dying to a turret has a chance to self-ping Missing.
Dearest Karthus
There’s a small chance for an automatic chat message addressed to Karthus when Karthus reaches level 6.
Howling Abyss
There’s a small chance for Lissandra to send a message at the end of the game.
Party Favors
New Item, Party Favor, is in the shop. Using it starts or joins a dance party. The more the merrier!
Custom Healthbar Colors
New Item, Custom Healthbars, is in the shop. Purchase automatically changes the color of the buyers healthbar to the corresponding color.
Quality of Life Changes
All champion abilities that directly interact with stats (Yasuo Q Cooldown, Kai’sa Evolutions) now scale with stat anvils in Mayhem.
Vampirism is no longer offered if you have Warmog’s Armor.
Draw Your Sword is no longer offered if you have Runaan’s Hurricane.
Kayn no longer loses the ability to shop after choosing a form.
Yuumi no longer loses the ability to shop after attaching to an ally.
Dropkick no longer overrides a champion’s execute indicator if they have one.
Little Legends no longer display an icon on the minimap.
We’re looking to give some mid-favored love to Cass, who hasn’t found her… uh… footing in the new season. By bumping up her base mana and empowered E scaling, she should feel a bit more freedom to angle for trades as well as be more rewarded when she finds them.
Kalista and her players have been patiently awaiting buffs, and we’re also ready to see her unleash her wrath once again. This change is aimed at making her hit harder when she finds an opening to stack up her spears.
E – Rend
Total AD scaling on bonus damage per additional stack: (+ 20 / 25 / 30 / 35 / 40% AD) ⇒ (+ 20 / 27.5 / 35 / 42.5 / 50% AD)
In addition to our nerfs to Karma and Nami,, we’re buffing one of our tank supports. Our hope here is to provide our favorite iron steed rider with a buff that drives excitement during her high points, so we’re making the horse go fast and further rewarding her clutch engages.
E – Full Tilt
Move Speed: 3s of 10%, increased to 25% when facing the empowered ally or a visible enemy champion ⇒ 15%, increased to 30%
Graves has seen a ton of play since his True Grit buffs, and even though he’s found pretty solid success with more durable builds, players are understandably still chasing those high roll crits to great results. Rather than rolling back his E buffs or pushing him further towards one build, we figured the best thing we can do is make his early clear and skirmishing a bit less consistent by dusting off an old wrench we haven’t used in half a decade, though we are keeping an eye on his 4-digit autos!
Karma has been a force to be reckoned with in high-skill support play for some time now. We think Karma’s strong early game is healthy, but we’re tuning down her midgame shields to be less inspiring, as it’s the only ability actually worth empowering and her enchanter builds far outperform her mage ones. This change should bring her Mantra options closer to equilibrium!
We’re nerfing another one of the most powerful supports to bring her in line with other options. Nami often excels in extremely aggressive early lanes, utilizing W self cast to bounce damage to enemies and getting high value out of both effects in a single cast. Now she will need to be more intentional about whether she wants the heal or the damage more.
W – Ebb and Flow
Bounce Modifier: -10% (+10% per 100 AP) effect per bounce ⇒ -20% (+15% per 100 AP) effect per bounce
Ornn has been a standout among top lane tanks across all player skill levels, helped by the new top lane role quest accelerating his access to Masterworks. We believe he has an appropriate amount of CC and durability, but we’re lowering his personal damage threat, especially against other high health champions.
Singed has been a big winner this season with free teleport, experience, Protoplasm, homeguards, weaker grubs…the list is almost as long as the number of ingredients in his Insanity Potion! Instead of making his early game even more vulnerable, we want to make Singed a bit more reliant on his own accumulated gold rather than his experience and free stats, especially now that he’s also doing a better job tanking damage.
Veigar has often been at the threshold of being considered overpowered in bot lane, and he’s been maintaining enough of a play rate there that it’s time to step in. One thing different between bot Veigar and mid Veigar is his scaling nature. In bot, he’s actually even more of a snowball champion than in mid where his win rate steadily climbs over game time. So we’re blunting that early-mid spike with a cooldown nerf that his mid players aren’t as reliant upon and can more easily outscale.
Ultimate haste no longer provides passive 0.015 passive fury generation per second but instead amplifies all fury generation by 1% per 1 ultimate haste. This should make ultimate haste function for Shyvana more similarly to how ability haste does for normal abilities.
We also micropatched some Sylas interactions last week. He was dealing too much damage when stealing Shyvana’s Q by applying her on-hit damage twice and essentially double-dipping on his total attack damage vs. his primary target.
Systems
Farming as Supports
After last patch where we weakened this mechanic, we’re now completely disabling the reduction in gold that used to kick in when support players killed too many minions in quick succession. This was added back when it was optimal to run two or more support items in the game, but now that it’s impossible to do so in competitive environments, we feel this extra restriction is unwarranted. We’ll be keeping an eye on support and bot laner dynamics around who farms the waves after this lands. We don’t expect much will change but supports who have to catch some farm here and there shouldn’t feel bad about it now.
Ranked
“When disruptive behavior like AFKing or trolling is detected in a match, full LP refunds will be given to negatively impacted players instead of partial refunds.”
David ‘Phreak’ Turley, best known as Riot Phreak, or the voice of almost every League of Legends Champion Reveal trailer, is stepping down from his role as live designer on League of Legends.
In the latest “Patch 26.07 Preview“, Phreak started it off by explaining he was set to leave League of Legends, and move on to another project at Riot Games.
Phreak has done this series of videos since he was a Shoutcaster on the North American LoL Esports scene. As he moved up to become a designer, he continued the series, but went into more depth on the subject.
“Late last year or early this year I was asked if I wanted to work on a different project within League of Legends. I said yes, and then I built a plan for offboarding onto the project and off of live design, and so that’s been happening over the last several months.
“Ultimately, although there are no details to share. I am still a game designer on League of Legends. I wanted to move over. I think it’s a very, very cool project. I think a lot of you will really love it. I’m very excited about this overall. But yeah, this is my last patch as a live designer for, I guess, quite a while. All I can really say here.”
Phreak then went on to talk about why the preview videos were stopping, after all, he did them prior to being a designer so why stop?
“Why am I not going to do any more of these videos?. If we go back to the history of it when I was a shoutcaster, I was just some guy, sure, I worked at Riot, but I was just some guy on the outside giving my opinions on stuff. That felt reasonable to do as just like, a highly-engaged League player. Then I became a game designer and I gave my opinions. But as a designer still working on League but not directly involved with the stuff, that just feels weird. I don’t want to critique other peoples’ work publicly when it’s not my job to do so. I think it’s just way easier to not talk about these anymore.”
Live SR Design Update
Yesterday, @RiotPhreak announced that he will be stepping away from Live Balance for the foreseeable future to work on some other exciting projects within League!
Want to thank him for all his work and I think we can agree that PhreakSzn has been a really…
What Phreak’s next project is, we don’t know. Riot Games continues to work on an MMO in the background, which is still expected to be released by 2030; however, it seems unlikely Phreak would work on that. It’s more likely some new project within Riot Games, though likely League of Legends related.
We’ve heard many rumours over the years, with the “action RPG” being the one that seemed to have the most legs. For now, we don’t have any more information, but we’ll update it once we have it.
– Singed is looking a bit too strong in especially normal play
– While this nerf looks like a bit of a meme, we expect it matters more than expected on paper just due to the number of stats impacted when ult is active
We’re still working on a larger set of changes for Shyvana, but they haven’t been finalized yet (I mentioned the direction of
some of the changes yesterday)
For this patch, just a change to make Ultimate Haste interactions and also the Sylas interaction nerf from previously
Shyvana definitely initially landed a bit strong, and her hotfix put her in a decent spot after that. She has a bit of an unintended interaction with Sylas that we will be micropatching out tomorrow; essentially, he benefits double from her auto attacks’ passive (with Sylas’s passive) that makes his attacks do pretty eye-popping values.
We’re still taking our time to evaluate role viability for Top Shyvana and whether it’s reasonably supportable without destroying Jungle role satisfaction. We’ve also been working on some changes to increase the satisfaction of Passive, reduce MMR skew, increase counterplay and satisfaction of E
First Stand
The First Stand meta ended up being quite good; there was significant diversity in every role between classes. One notable gap was AP junglers and AD mids (related), and so we’ll see what we can do to enable some more of those picks heading into the Season. Was especially happy with the Bot meta; Lethality Varus had a 14% winrate, and there was a good mix of Casters, Hypercarries and Utility as well as many fringe picks like Zeri, Kog, etc.
Ranged Supports are really starting to get away from the rest of the pack now, with laning being a much larger focus due to role quests. Not necessarily a bad thing, though, given that we’ve been in Melee supp meta for many years. Game pacing overall felt good (or at least I thought so), and the lack of lane swaps really allowed each role to shine, with GigaBin showcasing the power of an unleashed Top lane role. It really did seem like every lane could carry and balance of objectives vs splitting felt pretty appropriate
Support Quest
A few patches ago, we talked about reducing the negative impact of the support quest to reduce complexity – We’re going to pull this all the way this patch. This may result in some farming support shenanigans, but then you’re also denying your bot carry their quest progression; we’re giving it a go to see if anything breaks
