Author: Stan

The latest League of Legends patch 26.6 has been live for a while now and we’ve gathered enough data to see how the meta evolved compared to 26.5.

Disclaimer

We’re updating this tier list daily, check back often for updates.

Biggest Movers

Here are the biggest movers in patch 26.5 so far.

League of Legends Patch 26.6 Tier List

Here’s a tier list with the top 50 champions in the 26.6 ranked league right now. You can use the filters to sort by role.

To see the full rankings of champions in the latest update, check out our full Tier List!

Are you wondering what the best champions are for Arena right now in League of Legends patch 26.5? Well, look no further! We’ve got you covered with our most up-to-date data with patch-by-patch differences!

Disclaimer: This tier list is updated daily using data from thousands of ranked Arena matches on U.GG.

Biggest Movers

Here is a list with the biggest movers in patch 26.5. We compared the data with the previous patch and here are the results:

League of Legends Patch 26.5 Arena Tier List

Below, you will find the top 50 champions for Arena right now in the 26.5 update:

For the full list of champions, please, check out our Arena tier list.

We now have enough data to look at how the ARAM tier list has changed in the latest 26.5 update compared to the previous League of Legends patch!

ARAM Tier List

The following list contains the top 100 champions in ARAM right now. The rank, tier, and win rate changes are indicated by green/red arrows as seen below.

Interested to Learn More?

Check out our preliminary 26.5 ranked tier list and the ranked tier list for all live updates!

UPDATE: Riot has posted a preview of multiple Champion nerfs expected to go live in the 26.6 update.

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The latest League of Legends 26.5 update is now live, and with it, we’ve started receiving new match data! Let’s check out how the ranked tier list changed compared to patch 26.4!

Disclaimer: We’re updating this tier list daily, check back often for updates!

Biggest Movers

Here are the top risers and fallers in 26.5 so far:

League of Legends Patch 26.5 Tier List

Here’s a tier list with the top 50 champions in Patch 26.5 in ranked right now. You can use the filters to sort by role.

For more champions and the latest rankings, check out our Tier Lists!

Riot Games has uploaded a new skin trailer for Revenant Reign Viego, set to go live with the 26.0.2 update on January 22, 2026.

A mad king betrayed by his most trusted knights, Viego has returned from the Land of Death to slay those who turned against him and his beloved. And he’ll use their seven traitorous swords to do it.

Earlier today, Riot has posted a video of Pabro and Meddler talking about the upcoming changes in Season 1 of 2026. If you’ve missed the video, you can watch it here.

Highlights

Can’t tune in? Here’s a quick summary of the key takeaways:

• The gameplay and ranked changes announced in December will go live tomorrow, December 9. You will find more details in the official patch notes.
• Shyvana will receive her update in Act 2 of this Season, similar to Dr. Mundo or Volibear.
• The map will feature a Demacia-themed reskin with towers and gold winged acdents.

• Demacia Rising is a new evolving meta-game going live tomorrow, where you’ll help grow the Kingdom of Demacia.
• ARAM: Mayhem’s run is getting extended and it’s also getting a bigger update in the forthcoming 26.03 patch.
• Riot is trialing a new lobby hostage intervention system in some regions to take immediate action on bad actors in your lobbies. The feature will be rolled out over the next few patches.

• This patch comes with new skins for Briar, Samira, Galio, and Ornn.

• The Lunar Revel celebration will re-introduce Firecracker skins and bring a new thematic called Petals of Spring.
• The Victorious skin this season will be for Braum.
• Viego‘s Exalted skin will be out this season.
• The 2026 esports season kicks off with First Stand in São Paulo, Brazil, taking place from March 16 through March 22.
• To decouple side selection and draft order, Riot’s introducing “First Selection”, giving pro teams more flexibility.
• Bigger features currently being worked on include a brand new integrated client, a revamped Summoner’s Rift, changes to pre-game choices such as runes, and a reworked New Player Experience.

Source: League of Legends News

Riot recently released Patch 25.24 and we’ve got enough data now to look at the top winners and losers of the update!

How’s the Tier List Calculated?

The tier list is built for Ranked Solo players at Emerald and above across every region. The list is generated by measuring standard deviations in 3 key metrics:

• Win rate: how reliably a champion converts games into victories
• Pick rate: how often players choose that champion in Emerald+
• Ban rate: how frequently the champion gets banned in picks

Tier List for League of Legends Patch 25.24

All data presented in this article was gathered by U.GG. Here’s a look at the Top 30 Champion tier list with differences between Patch 25.23 and Patch 25.24 clearly highlighted in the table.

Position		Champion	Role	Current Tier (25.24 vs 25.23)
1		Zaahen		S+ (► 1)
2		Miss Fortune		S+ (► 2)
3		Sylas		S+ (▲ 8)
4		Malphite		S+ (▲ 6)
5		Draven		S+ (► 5)
6		Milio		S+ (▼ 4)
7		LeBlanc		S+ (▲ 30+)
8		Master Yi		S+ (▲ 9)
9		Blitzcrank		S+ (▲ New in Top 30)
10		Shaco		S+ (▲ 11)
11		Vayne		S+ (▲ 15)
12		Nami		S+ (▼ 7)
13		Karma		S+ (▲ 23)
14		Ashe		S+ (▼ 10)
15		Bel’Veth		S+ (▲ 19)
16		Lee Sin		S+ (▲ 30+)
17		Braum		S+ (▲ 30+)
18		Katarina		S+ (▼ 3)
19		Leona		S+ (▼ 12)
20		Briar		S+ (▲ New in Top 30)
21		Thresh		S+ (▼ 18)
22		Bard		S+ (▼ 17)
23		Diana		S+ (▲ New in Top 30)
24		Poppy		S+ (▲ New in Top 30)
25		Jinx		S+ (▲ New in Top 30)
26		Kha’Zix		S+ (▼ 14)
27		Aatrox		S+ (▲ New in Top 30)
28		Tristana		S+ (▲ New in Top 30)
29		Ahri		S (▼ 20)
30		Syndra		S (▼ 25)

Riot’s giving Swiftplay a serious overhaul in 2026, changing everything from dragon timing to lane pressure to jungle flow. The changes will make the mode feel completely different. And if you want to look at all the changes from Riot’s last big dev update of 2025, don’t miss our dedicated rundown.

Here is the official blog post by Riot goig over all the changes planned for Swifplay:

Hey everyone! I’m Bryan “Riot Axes” Salvatore, the Director of Design for League, overseeing the overall gameplay experience, from the Summoner’s Rift Ranked experience to game modes. If it involves gameplay, it’s my job to ensure we’re making the right strategic choices. Today I’m here to share some updates to Swiftplay, so let’s get into it!

Swiftplay’s Place in League

Maybe you find yourself barely having enough time for a quick match. Or you’re looking to try out a new champion without investing time in a full game. Or you’re a new player looking to get your footing on the Rift. Swiftplay is meant to be a fast queue that still allows you to experience the full arc of what League can offer. It’s a faster paced, but still substantive, bite of what “League” is.

We believe that Swiftplay has a lot of potential to be that queue, but we haven’t quite reached that goal. So we’ve identified three pillars that we want to improve based on your feedback, testing, and surveys: pacing, laning, and jungle. 

Let’s Talk Pacing 

Swiftplay has been out for nearly a year now, and in that time we’ve identified some opportunities to improve its overall pacing. As we’ve studied how matches play out, a few themes have become especially clear.

To start, despite Swiftplay being shorter (by about eight minutes on average) it’s still a bit longer than we’d like. Swiftplay also inherits a lot of the slower, more methodical pacing of regular SR: a drawn-out early laning phase, long death timers and runbacks, and generally low action density. Then, on top of that, the mode compresses every single neutral objective from SR into a shorter timeline. This all leads to a game that is not only a slower pace than SR, but is strategically more dense.

The biggest “feel” impact on game pacing is objectives. While things like how minions scale or your gains of gold/experience can impact game length, objective changes can have an impact on how the pacing actually “feels” and plays out.

So we’re primarily targeting objectives to get that correct feel that we want Swiftplay to have (deep breath): Like in other queues, Atakhan and Feats of Strength are removed from the game. In addition, in Swiftplay only, Void Grubs and Rift Herald are also removed. Elemental dragons now spawn no more than twice, and you have to kill both in order to claim Dragon Soul. Baron Nashor spawns at 12:00. Elder Dragon now always spawns at exactly 15:00 and every 6 minutes thereafter, and if there’s a dragon in the pit, it’ll despawn to make room for Elder.

We’re aiming to hit a few goals with these changes: First, we want to ensure that the pacing of objectives actually promotes shorter game lengths–you should have more time to spend doing things that actively push the game forward, like hitting towers, and less overall time playing around objectives. Second, we want to ramp into game-ending power faster. And third, we want to make the jungle less stressful (more on that in a bit.)

There are a few more odds and ends worth calling out: The Elemental Rift transformation now happens after the first dragon is killed since there are only two; if none are killed by 15:00, then no Elemental Rift transformation will occur. Baron buff now persists through death, empowering you to comfortably leverage that power to progress games. And Sudden Death happens 5 minutes sooner (at 25 minutes) to ensure that we’re pulling down that upper ceiling of game length.

All of these changes as a whole will drastically cut down on the pacing issues that Swiftplay is suffering from, while also opening up a lot of space to actually engage in moment-to-moment champion combat.

Gotta Go Fast… to Lane

Another area that we’ve examined is laning. Specifically, the time it takes to get to, and advance, lane. Fundamentally, the structure of Summoner’s Rift means that killing champions doesn’t directly drive the game towards a conclusion. They indirectly advance the game because they allow you to build a lead and give you the opportunity to push turrets and win lane while they stare at a grey screen only to slowly run back. 

However this is Swiftplay, and who wants to wait around forever? We want to give you more momentum in those windows to progress, as well as get you back to lane faster to contest being pushed.

In order to help push lanes in those windows, we’ve created a new mechanic: Minion Frenzy. Whenever you kill an enemy champion, your nearby minions will frenzy, gaining a large amount of movement speed, attack speed, and damage to enemy minions and turrets, and sharing any minion kill gold with nearby allied champions. (You don’t have to compete with them for last hits!) If you get a kill in the jungle, you’ll gain a buff that applies Minion Frenzy to the next group of minions you encounter.

Swiftplay will also be receiving the new Crystalline Overgrowth mechanic that we’re adding to the Rift. We covered it in the Season One Gameplay Preview, but the gist of this is that slowly over time, crystals will grow on a tower that hasn’t been hit, and when hit will consume to deal an extra burst of damage. Think “Demolish for everyone,” giving everyone the power to actually push or progress a lane when it’s in a state for pushing. If you’re a Demolish fan, don’t worry, it’s not going away. We’re just changing it to a time-honored tradition… a three-hit passive.

This means that winning lane much more readily leads to damaging enemy turrets, which in turn progresses your game state. And that means no more long grey screens and runbacks: Death Timers are significantly reduced, and Homeguards go much faster and farther in Swiftplay now, even more so than the new Homeguards in other Summoner’s Rift queues. 

Besides Minion Frenzy, you’ll be able to dive right into the action at the start of each game now, starting at level 3, with 1400 gold—like ARAM—and Doran’s Blade, Shield, and Ring have been replaced with Guardian’s Horn, Orb, Blade, and Hammer. Just as with Norms and Ranked in the new Season, minions spawn at 0:30, but in Swiftplay we’re also adding a cannon minion to every wave after the third, ensuring that every wave is worth pushing (especially with Minion Frenzy!)

Welcome to the Jungle

It’s no secret that jungle is by far the least popular position in Swiftplay. There are two major causes that we want to tackle right now: First clears are just as punishing as they are in Norms and Ranked, leading jungle to be the least forgiving to off-meta champions, and the strategy game of playing for neutral epics is even more frenetic than other queues despite the goal of Swiftplay being lower stakes.

When we started this project, we set out to address first clears by tuning the jungle monsters to be more forgiving—dealing less damage, taking more damage from your pet, and so on, ensuring that the jungle would be easier to clear for more champions. We’ve since pulled back on most of those changes, however—it turns out that starting at level 3 with 1400 gold is already a massive buff to clear speed and safety, even though the first batch of jungle monsters also spawn in at level 3 now.

The only major jungle clear changes you’ll see are that most jungle camps respawn 15 seconds faster, and it takes only 15 treats for the first upgrade to your jungle pet, and 25 treats for the second. Our intent is that early clears are much more forgiving for off-meta junglers, and we’ll continue to monitor to make sure that’s actually the case.

The other major pain point we were aiming to address here was how overwhelming neutral objectives have been. Swiftplay has had almost the same number of neutral objectives, but compressed into a much shorter time, leading to the feeling that the game was just leading you around. As noted above, we’re thinning out the objective game by removing Grubs, Rift Herald, and Atakhan—you’ll only have dragons and Baron to worry about now, and you’ll have plenty of time to farm up (or, you know, gank, if that happens to be your thing…) in the meantime.

We’ll be continuing to monitor the jungle going forward, but we think that these changes, simple as they are, should make the experience of playing jungle noticeably less stressful and more forgiving, especially for off-meta picks.

Outro

That’s all we have on Swiftplay for now, so be sure to check it out when we kick off the new year. We’re looking forward to seeing you all get to try out these updates and seeing all your feedback.

Source: Riot News

Riot has dropped the last Dev Update of 2025. Join Pabro and Meddler as they talk about Season 1 2026, including the theme, Ranked changes, Swiftplay, and more.

Dev Update Highlights

If you don’t have the time to watch the whole video, don’t worry, we have you covered with a recap!

Season 1 2026 Theme: Demacia and a “Hope Era”

• They’ll continue to find the right balance for thematic Seasons moving forward.
• Season 1 starts with themes of unity, justice, and the classic Demacian blue-and-gold shine, which means new Demacia-inspired map elements and a skill line featuring champions reimagined as Demacians.
• Riot will drop a cinematic in January that goes “old-school Demacia,” set during what they call its golden age.

Core Gameplay Changes

• Riot said the game has leaned way too hard into “fight every objective every 2 minutes.” They will shift away from that philosophy.

Faster Game Start

• Minions and jungle camps spawn 35 seconds earlier, which means the game begins at full speed the moment you load in. Early invades will still work, but you will need to commit faster.

Vision Overhaul with Faelights

• Riot wants pushing solo laners to matter more by adding Faelights, special zones that give bonus vision to wards. Some will exist at game starts, others will appear when the Elemental Rift kicks in.
• With this change, they hope to give mid and top laners more vision tools that reward pressure.

Objectives Are Being Pulled Back

• Atakhan has been removed.
• Baron returns to its 20-minute spawn.
• Epic monsters are beefier.
• Teams behind have more room to contest or trade.
• Feats of Strength have been removed, replaced by normal rewards like First Blood and First Turret gold returning.

Sledging & Pushing Are Getting Buffs

• Riot is pushing the meta toward split-pushing and turret pressure.
• Hitting towers will unleash bonus damage, giving the every team real pushing windows even without insane DPS.
• Plates have been added to inner and inhibitor towers and stay on outer towers permanently.
• Minions spawn faster and late-game Homeguards take you straight to your furthest wave.
• Nexus turrets respawn with missing health.

The changes above should bring back macro, the part of League many players miss.

Role Quests: The Biggest Changes of 2026

• Top, mid, and bot are getting their role quests, similar to jungle pets and support upgrades.
• Your quest is tied to the role you were assigned in lobby.

Top Lane Changes

Riot’s making some changes to the top lane to ensure top laners can influence the game outside their island.

• Once you complete the quest, you will get a free teleport
• You will receive a stronger teleport if you already took TP
• Gives more XP now
• A raised level cap

Mid Lane

Mid players will unlock:

• A free Tier 3 boot upgrade
• Faster recall times, very useful for assassins, battlemages, and other weird picks

Bot Lane

ADC’s are getting:

• A big gold boost from quest completion
• Bonus gold from CS, kills, and assists
• A new seventh slot holding boots permanently resulting in 6 full legendary items total

Jungle & Support Updates

Jungle early influence is being nerfed via:

• Slower early clears
• Epic monsters harder for laners to steal
• Smite dealing more damage
• More gold/XP from large mobs after quest completion
• Bonus jungle movement speed

Support gets:

• A dedicated control-ward slot
• Discounts on control wards
• Buffs to passive gold regeneration
• Lane Swap Detected is getting permanently removed

Ranked 2026 Changes

We have a separate article covering the Ranked 2026 changes.

Item Shake-Up: 9 New Toys and Returning Favorites

• Scepter of Bonking: empowers Spellblade to double your on-hit effects
• Blood Sphere: Omnivamp + Ability Haste scaling for AD fighters
• Snowbow: bonus range on takedown for precise ADCs, plus distance-based damage amp
• Crit damage returns to 200%

Swiftplay Changes

Riot made the following changes to Swiftplay to make the games faster:

• Players start at level 3 with bonus starting gold
• Death timers have been reduced
• Cannon minions spawn every wave after wave 3
• New “Minion Frenzy” effect when you score kills around your wave
• Earlier Baron and Elder spawns
• Dragon Soul at two dragons
• Grubs or Rift Herald have been removed from this mode

WASD Controls Go Live in Unranked Queues

• WASD controls are going live in all unranked queues except Normal Draft

New features include:

• Auto-attack weaving has been optimized for WASD users
• Better navigation around minions
• A dynamic locked camera with speed tuning
• A new Scout ahead free-camera mode
• Accessibility options like 45-degree directional movement