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.
Can’t tune in? Here’s a quick summary of the key takeaways:
Source: League of Legends News
The first patch notes of the new season have arrived, and include a handful of buffs, nerfs and adjustments. Check out the full patch 26.1 notes for additional details from Riot (source).
Akshan’s abilities currently scale crit in three different ways and we’re making that more consistent here. His passive auto, being functionally a true basic attack, will crit for 100% value. Meanwhile, the crit scaling on E and R are going down as compensation. We’re also doing some discretionary adjustments to allow Q-max and E-max to perform at similar levels of power by adjusting their rank-up incentives.
Aphelios has a lot of intricacies and some of his abilities try to behave exactly like basic attacks. With that in mind, we’re converting Severum’s active to total attack damage in line with similar abilities and generally lowering the bonus AD ratios of several abilities that already scale well due to firing off basic attacks that can crit as part of their cast.
Ashe is already quite attack-reliant and pretty balanced but considering she buys about 1.5 crit items per game, we’re lowering her late game a little to make room for the increased damage coming her way.
Caitlyn’s top-end Headshot damage has gotten out of hand and with the value of critical strikes going up it’s about to get even stronger, so we’re taking a heavy swing to Headshot’s top end. We’re also making her R scale with Infinity Edge, as it already scales with critical strike chance, but we’re reducing its damage to make room for her stronger basic attacks.
While Cassiopeia’s no boots passive is very thematic, the addition of more boot based systems over the years (like role quest rewards) has made it feel like a punishment at times instead of a boon. We think it’s important for Cassio to have the opportunity to engage with these new systems so we’re reworking the passive into a new movement based effect. (We also wanted to do Soobin a solid.)
Corki isn’t particularly strong at the moment, so while this is a nerf on paper, we expect Corki will be overall stronger at the start of the season. This nerf is aimed at weakening his ability to crush a minion wave right before a Recall.
Draven is very auto-attack focused and averages about two crit items per game, so he’s also in need of some compensation. Considering he’s gaining direct auto-attack DPS, we’re trying to compensate him directly on the same axis.
Elise is in a silly spot where ability power quickly fails to scale her damage against monsters after the mid game. We’re delivering a change that will be a slight buff on average but is primarily meant to let her damage scale up with AP like it would for anyone else.
Gangplank is one of two champions (alongside Smolder) who we think is going to gain extra power due to Essence Reaver once again building from Sheen. We expect him to perform much, much better with his increased critical strike damage, so we’re pulling out many of the unique crit scalars that have been added over the years and delivering an extra hit to his E on top.
Critical strike chance on Garen is pretty good since both his basic attacks and Judgment are improved by it. We want to continue to make space for non-crit Garen builds, so we’re compensating the global critical strike damage increase and updating the calculation to properly discount bonus crit damage.
The functional result of these Graves changes should be almost nothing. He’ll deal about 1% more damage with his basic attacks when critically striking.
Now that the top lane quest can raise champion levels to 20, we’re looking for any champions who intermittently scale their passives and giving them another breakpoint if they deserve one. Jax is one such champion who’s gaining a bit more attack speed at level 19.
Jhin won’t behave any differently next season as we want to avoid letting his guaranteed crit fourth shot do too much damage.
We like the overall shape of how Jinx functions and generally just want to preserve the value of her minigun’s high attack speed, so we’re making sure her two stances are more distinguished from one another and generally lowering a bit of spell damage to keep her attack-focused.
Kindred’s E mechanics are rather confusing and they build several critical strike items already. So we’re updating the E to be much easier to understand and reducing the numbers. We’re also modernizing the E’s monster cap to allow for more damage when building AD and ranking up the ability.
Lucian’s builds are pretty sensible and as a spell-focused ADC, but we want to make sure his spell scaling is good. We’re updating R to fire even more bullets with crit damage, which will make crit scale his ult just as well as it scales basic attacks. Considering he’s already got extremely strong AD scaling and we want to make sure that Navori Flickerblades feels good, we’re bringing down some of his Q’s AD scaling.
Miss Fortune tends to build quite a lot of critical strike chance and we’d like it to stay that way, but she can’t just be directly buffed so we’re here to compensate some of that value by softening her Q crit mod. For her R, we want to make sure that critical strikes feel like they have some impact, so we’re increasing the crit mod slightly, but in order to not push her scaling too hard, have compensated that with a new base damage and a lower AD ratio.
Nilah’s in an interesting place where her Q didn’t scale with Infinity Edge, so unlocking that avenue marks a small power increase on top of her basic attacks getting better, so we sought to find other ways to slightly lower her late game scaling as compensation.
As Quinn builds a decent amount of crit and that crit manifests in stronger autos and more passive procs, we’re compensation nerfing those same auto-reliant passive procs.
Rengar is getting a heavy re-script. This is mostly intended to maintain current functionality and feel, while addressing bugs and tech debt. The list of bug fixes is too long to add here so it’ll be added to the bugs section. Alongside the crit changes, we’re looking to make Rengar’s Q work more intuitively by letting the underlying attack itself roll for critical strikes, and if so, deal bonus damage based on his total AD. This removes an optimization around rushing Infinity Edge to enhance the old forced-crit mechanic and also makes him not immediately lose 30% of his damage if his opponents build Randuin’s Omen. We’ll keep an eye on lethality-vs-crit Rengar and how it performs next season as we suspect Essence Reaver will be a big deal on him.
We like that Samira’s R and Q are almost direct auto-attack replacements and want to preserve as much of their crit damage as possible. However, with the value of crit going up, the value of AD must then go down.
Like Jhin, Yasuo, and Yone, Senna’s guaranteed critical strikes cannot sustain a 2x modifier, so we’re lowering her base crit damage down to a value similar to last year.
When Shaco crits during a Backstab or a Deceive, everything crits along with it for his full crit damage, so his top end can be very, very high. We like that he builds for crit sometimes and want to let as many of these tools inherit the new higher base crit damage, but also want to modernize his other scalings to respect crit damage mods more consistently and generally preserve the total power level of Shaco builds that don’t buy any critical strike chance.
As Sivir’s going to gain a lot of power from stronger Ricochet crits, we’re reducing her Q’s scaling.
Smolder, like Gangplank, stands to gain a lot of power from Essence Reaver’s changes in this patch so we’re taking a swing at how strongly his Q scales with critical strike purchases.
Tristana’s E is one of the sharpest-scaling abilities in the game, and considering her late game is already poised to be great with a strong attack speed steroid, long range, and lots of crit damage, we think the top end of her E can stand to go down a few pegs.
Tryndamere is getting some real gameplay updates with this patch and some very real nerfs due to how much critical strike chance he normally has. To weaken how incredible his early game all-ins can be with 200% crit damage, we’re nerfing his early bonus AD from Q and nerfing his early E as well. However, he’s also getting some new tools.
First, his Q now gives full value at 10% remaining health, meaning he can get the full bonus attack damage during his ultimate and it no longer has a disincentive for ranking up. Second, his W will now slow enemies any time they are running away from Tryndamere, regardless of where they were looking when he cast it. We expect this substantial increase in reliability is a big buff, so we’ve preemptively nerfed the slow itself. Though the slow duration is going down, the AD reduction is still the full four seconds regardless of facing.
Twitch’s late game team deletion with 200% crit damage will probably be too fast, so we’re targeting some general late-game DPS nerfs.
Viego buys a decent amount of crit chance and we want to make sure those crits allow him to play out a consistent auto-attack pattern, so the larger nerfs are to the active damage of the Q and R.
We’re updating Xayah’s E to care about crit damage and adjusting her E’s overall damage profile to be more reliable and less snowbally.
Yasuo won’t be much different this year. Considering he doubles how much critical strike chance he gets from each item, he just isn’t allowed to crit for full damage.
Yone won’t be much different this year. Considering he doubles how much critical strike chance he gets from each item, he just isn’t allowed to crit for full damage.
Yunara has a crit build and an on-hit build, but even her on-hit build almost always picks up Hurricane, so she’s getting stronger no matter what she does next season. We’re looking for nerfs that will skew more toward low-Attack Speed high-AD crit builds, as they’ll be more directly buffed by the global crit damage increase.
We’re updating Zeri’s E to crit exactly as a basic attack would, which means re-tuning some of her abilities to make room for that power.
It’s been a while, but we’ve got a new active item. This one is made to support mana-stacking builds, to create more builds where mana isn’t just a limitation but instead make it so that it can be an advantage to have large amounts of mana available to you. Activating Actualizer significantly increases your manacosts in exchange for lower cooldowns and more ability damage, healing, and shielding for a short duration, so get your mana items ready for a very powerful popoff moment.
Tank supports don’t have very many items, and the ones they do have generally focus on helping them roam or protect their allies. We wanted to go a different direction this time, instead giving them a team-wide attack speed aura you can keep up in fights as long as you’re able to frequently apply crowd control to your enemies.
Most AD assassins aren’t particularly good at ending games, even when they are capable of getting lots of kills. This can lead to pretty frustrating situations where the assassin player feels like they don’t have the tools they need to complete the game, and the players on the receiving end get continuously killed and stay trapped in a game where they can’t survive. Bastionbreaker gives AD assassins a new luxury item that can help them close out games by giving them large amounts of damage to epic monsters and turrets as long as they’re building lots of lethality and can kill some takedowns.
Most AP fighters have incentives in their kit to autoattack, but they have very little access to items that actually support that pattern since Lich Bane and Nashor’s Tooth don’t offer the defensive stats that this subclass often needs. Dusk and Dawn offers a Sheen pattern that doubles on-hits to help champions in this space live their dreams of sustained combat with lots of additional on-hits to enhance whatever their kit is already doing.
Since the removal of Goredrinker and the removal of omnivamp on Eclipse, AD caster fighters have had little to no access to sustain via the item system. Endless Hunger is a heavy AD-scaling item that rewards building high amounts of AD and can lead to some awesome popoffs in teamfights if you can get a takedown and keep casting through the enemy team.
When marksmen look at Zeal items, we want them to have different options to choose from that are good in different situations or good for particular champions. Fiendhunter bolts allows for a concentrated moment of power after casting an ultimate, which is particularly exciting for the marksman that already have that pattern like Twitch, Zeri, or Yunara. Some others might like the ultimate haste this item offers, or just want to be able to get immediate combat value after ulting.
We’ve always wanted to support more diversity in crit marksman builds after the first item, so Hexoptics C44 is here to add an additional option for those looking to opt into big teamfight outputs. If you can get one takedown, you can get some extra range to help you secure more kills, and on top of that you also get some bonus damage scaling based on how well you can space your opponents.
Tanks have lots of tools to make them more durable in different ways, but Protoplasm Harness offers them a Lifeline item that has some movespeed and tenacity to enable a choice: do you want to keep going forward, or do you want to try to leave the fight? If you’re tanky enough to survive, you can even get the full benefits from the healing over time this item grants, which scales with your armor and magic resistance to make sure it slots well into resistance-building tank builds.
This is a two-item pair for enchanters: a new evolving Tear item. Some enchanters really like mana and some even step into the mage system to get it, so we’re going to offer a new item that allows them to get flat mana from the enchanter system but also scales well with additional mana purchases if anyone does want to get into a heal-based mana-stacking build.
Gunblade is one of the most requested removed items, as well as a popular item in alternate game modes despite a relatively limited champion user pool. We think that we can control some of the negative gameplay of this item with tuning, especially on the amount of Omnivamp granted and on the frequency with which users can apply the powerful active effect, so we think this is safe to add back in.
Stormrazor complements our efforts at increasing the variety of items available to critical strike-using champions, providing another Energized effect in that system. Stormrazor will be our second Attack Damage + Attack Speed + Critical Strike option in the ecosystem, lowering the degree to which critical strike build paths funnel through Yun Tal Wildarrows.
Patch 25.24 has been up for a while now and it’s time to look at the most-banned champions in the update.
Ban rate is how often a champion gets banned during champion select. If a champion has a 20% ban rate, it means in around 1 out of every 5 games, someone on either team used a ban on that character, meaning nobody can pick it.
Here’s a tier list with the top 30 most-banned roles in Patch 25.24.
Disclaimer: All stats in this table are pulled from our site for Ranked Solo, Emerald+, Worldwide, on Patch 25.24.
| Position | Champion | Role | Tier | Ban Rate | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |
 |
Zaahen |
 |
A | 52.7% |
| 2 |
|
Zaahen |
 |
S+ | 52.7% |
| 3 |
 |
Mel |
 |
D | 50.4% |
| 4 |
|
Mel |
 |
D | 50.4% |
| 5 |
|
Mel |
 |
D | 50.4% |
| 6 |
 |
Sylas |
|
B | 29.7% |
| 7 |
|
Sylas |
|
A | 29.7% |
| 8 |
|
Sylas |
|
S+ | 29.7% |
| 9 |
|
Sylas |
|
A | 29.7% |
| 10 |
 |
Pyke |
|
A | 28.2% |
| 11 |
 |
Malphite |
|
D | 27.9% |
| 12 |
|
Malphite |
|
S+ | 27.9% |
| 13 |
|
Malphite |
|
S | 27.9% |
| 14 |
 |
Zed |
|
D | 23.5% |
| 15 |
|
Zed |
|
D | 23.5% |
| 16 |
 |
LeBlanc |
|
B | 20.8% |
| 17 |
|
LeBlanc |
|
A | 20.8% |
| 18 |
 |
Draven |
|
S+ | 20.5% |
| 19 |
 |
Aatrox |
|
D | 17.8% |
| 20 |
|
Aatrox |
|
S+ | 17.8% |
| 21 |
 |
Shaco |
|
S | 17.0% |
| 22 |
|
Shaco |
|
S+ | 17.0% |
| 23 |
 |
Miss Fortune |
|
S+ | 16.0% |
| 24 |
 |
Yasuo |
|
C | 16.0% |
| 25 |
|
Yasuo |
|
B | 16.0% |
| 26 |
|
Yasuo |
|
A | 16.0% |
| 27 |
 |
Jax |
|
B | 15.4% |
| 28 |
|
Jax |
|
S | 15.4% |
| 29 |
 |
Morgana |
|
B | 14.5% |
| 30 |
|
Morgana |
|
S | 14.5% |
If you’re interested in more stats, head over to our tier list and check out the biggest winners and losers of Patch 25.24!
Riot recently released Patch 25.24 and we’ve got enough data now to look at the top winners and losers of the update!
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:
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) |
League of Legends 25.24 Patch Notes are here and include a handful of buffs, nerfs and adjustments. Check out the full patch notes for additional details from Riot (source).
The Summoner’s Rift Ranked Season for Season 3, 2025 will end 2026-01-07 23:59:59, according to your local server time, which is the last day of 15.24 patch cycle.
Similar to previous years, Summoner’s Rift ranked queues will be disabled for 12 hours for preparation of Season 1, 2026 start, which will begin on 2026-01-08 12:00:00 (noon) local server time at which point LP and ranks will reset for the new year.
The end of season 3 2025 also means the 2025 ranked season is coming to an end. The end of season year rewards will include not only Victorious Draven Skin and Chromas, but also accessories that celebrate your highest rank achieved during the year! Rewards will be as follows and will be distributed in patch 26.1 next year:
We’ll have more details about the 2026 ranked season in the 26.1 patch notes, but for now good luck on your end of year climbs!
WASD will go live in most unranked queues across all regions this patch. Draft and Ranked queues will not support WASD at this time. We will roll out on OCE, and slowly scale to all regions. Given WASD is still in a beta state and that we are in active iteration, we might disable certain queues or champions in case of a degraded player experience. In cases where we disable WASD for specific modes or champions, your keybindings will return back to Point and Click while playing those champions/playing in those queues. For 25.24, both Briar and Taliyah will have WASD disabled. When enabled again, your control scheme will default to the player selected choice.
Please make sure to report to Player Support any issues found, and to learn more about WASD, read here!
WASD will be enabled in the following queues:
WASD New Features:
We will be using balance data from live to further iterate on the WASD experience, prior to considering enabling it within Ranked queues, so please let us know what you think and report any bugs! We will be continuing to release additional promised features in the next year.
After a successful pilot and positive player feedback following the introduction of disallowing champions allies hover from being banned as well as faster champion select timings, we’re fully releasing both updates. On a similar note, the QoL improvements to speed up champ select have also been well received and, as a result, we’ve decided to roll them out to all regions globally.
Our resident mustachioed muscle man is a little weak right now, so in this patch we’re looking to put a bit more pep in his… punch. To do that, we’re playing up his active brawling with some durability early on and increased damage in extended fights so he can punch his opponents into submission.
We overestimated the impact of last patch’s Dr. Mundo bugfix, which means our compensation buff overshot as well. That said, we’re still happy with where Top Mundo ended up, but Jungle Mundo is now a little over the line, so we’re here to deliver a jungle-specific nerf to bring his two primary roles closer to parity.
Shadow Assassin Kayn is a bit too good at taking down his targets at the moment so we’re here this patch to give them a fighting chance. We don’t want Rhaast to be caught in the crossfire of these nerfs so we’re taking aim at some of Blue Kayn’s assassin-specific damage that often comes in the form of W poke from the fog of war.
Kha’Zix is one of the strongest junglers at the moment and is in need of a nerf. We don’t want to hurt his ability to assassinate targets, so instead we’re going to slow down his jungle clear a touch by reducing his early AoE.
Master Yi is another powerful champion who’s been dominating the jungle as of late. To level the playing field we’re bringing down his durability and damage a bit split between the early and late game as we’re currently happy with his overall combat and game pacing.
While not mathematically overpowered, Mel has solidified herself as the most frustrating champion to face in League, which is a deeper problem than just numbers. In the short term we’re delivering a direct nerf that will still allow dedicated mains to win an appropriate number of games, but will make her suboptimal for inexperienced players. As for our changes themselves, we’re going after how inescapable her E can feel to play against.
In the longer term, we have some larger work planned for early next year with more significant changes aimed at returning her to a more appropriate power level while also making her feel more fair to play against for her opponents.
Nasus has been an underdog for some time now so we’re looking to throw him a bone with some changes that will make him a bit more durable in lane and powering up his Q for more effective stacking (because who hasn’t missed a cannon minion by 5 health before).
Nidalee has risen up the ranks as an extremely high-powered jungler, largely due to a bug where her Q deals more damage than it should at most ranges. We’ve fixed this bug and will keep an eye on her to see how she lands.
Much like her fellow Freljordian tank, Sejuani is one of the weaker champions in the game right now, so we’re here to deliver a shot in the arm with some cooldown buffs. While we’re here, we’re also taking a pass on making Top Sejuani and AP Sejuani more viable as well because who doesn’t love a good AP Sejuani?
Swain’s buff last patch didn’t help him out as much as we had wanted to so we’re following up to put more wind in his sails (wings? Demon wing?) We’re keeping things relatively straightforward with increased healing from his passive which should be generally appreciable.
Viktor’s in need of a little more power right now, and we’d like to do that by leaning into his strengths as a mid-range battlemage. To do this we’re increasing the shield on his Q so that he can stick it out better when going in to look for trades against opponents.
These changes went out as a micropatch during 25.23, but we wanted to capture them here for posterity and offer some thoughts on how we think Zaahen’s release went.
For 25.23, overall Zaahen released a bit too strong. His damage was a bit high and had room to go down while still feeling satisfying, so we decided to target that over other parts of his kit. We’re being cautious here, so we’re taking a little more time to see how he settles before we make additional changes, but we’ll be keeping our eyes peeled and will make additional changes as needed.
Now we’re at 25.24 and Zaahen is still a bit strong, particularly in higher ranks, so we’ve got some skill skewed changes here which should bring him down a bit. We also want to compensate his jungle a bit as we expect it to lose some power as a result of these changes, so we’re upping his Q’s monster damage mod.
One bar we want to hold for high-quality jungle gameplay is around exactly how quickly a champion can clear their own jungle and then reasonably invade their opponents. In Zed’s case, he can clear his jungle to hit level 4 and invade you, or instead, Recall, buy two Long Swords, and then fight you for Rift Scuttler. Of course someone has to have the fastest clear in the game (that crown will move to Ivern most likely), but what they do with that speed is important, and the way Zed manifests his jungle strengths crosses the line. So this patch, we’re slowing his early jungle clear speed by a few seconds, which we expect will make him too weak for many players. While we like the variety he brings to the game and jungle, we don’t believe it can come at the cost of overall game health.
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.
If you don’t have the time to watch the whole video, don’t worry, we have you covered with a recap!
The changes above should bring back macro, the part of League many players miss.
Riot’s making some changes to the top lane to ensure top laners can influence the game outside their island.
Mid players will unlock:
ADC’s are getting:
Jungle early influence is being nerfed via:
Support gets:
We have a separate article covering the Ranked 2026 changes.
Riot made the following changes to Swiftplay to make the games faster:
New features include:
All of this information comes from Riot’s official /dev blog, which can be found here.
“A reality of League is that some roles are just more popular than others. Autofill exists to keep your queues going, otherwise we’d see extremely long queue times for mid lane especially. That said, we know that getting a role you didn’t choose is frustrating, especially when you tried your best and lost LP for something out of your control.”
/dev: Ranked 2026 – Riot Dev Blog
Autofill Parity is Riot’s new approach to matching autofilled players in games. While Autofill isn’t going away in 2026, it’s gotten a big upgrade. Being autofilled into a role you’re not comfortable with (especially against someone who mains it) can be rough, so the updated system changes things up to make the experience better:
“Aegis of Valor will reward you with either double LP or full protection from LP loss on an autofilled game if you get a mastery score of C or higher.
/dev: Ranked 2026 – Riot Dev Blog
When you get into a lobby, you’ll be notified that the Aegis is in effect, and that you’ll be protected (or rewarded) for your effort in that game if you meet the requirement.”
Support and Jungle mains will automatically get Aegis rewards around the same rate that Autofilled players do, though they won’t be notified before going into a match.
“Another pain point we want to address this year is the awful experience of experiencing chain dodges, and the lobbies that result from them. Aside from the time wasted getting back into new lobbies, your opponents might be able to predict your picks and target ban you, and trust between teammates may start off on the wrong foot. So, we’re implementing several changes to cut back on dodging.”
/dev: Ranked 2026 – Riot Dev Blog
“Another pain point we’re looking to address is how long it takes to get into a game. Before a successful game even starts, there are all sorts of things that could go wrong, including dodging, lobby hostaging, or more. And all of these things cause your queue time to be extended. We know that lobby hostaging is an area that needs improvements, and we’re working on a suite of changes to help address this early next year, but for now let’s talk about what’s changing now.”
/dev: Ranked 2026 – Riot Dev Blog
“Another place that we’re trying to make changes is how MMR and ranks line up at the lower end of the ladder. Over time, the distribution of players across different ranks has drifted out of alignment with their actual skill. Simply stated, you’ve all gotten much better since we introduced Ranked years ago. Where a Bronze player of the past might not know much about the game at all, today’s Bronze player is often familiar with wave management, champion matchups, and objective timing.
If a new player entering Ranked ends up in a match against opponents with that degree of knowledge, it’s just not a great experience for anyone involved. So, we’ll be recalibrating some of those lower tiers to more accurately reflect the skills of the players within them. This update is about realigning the tiers with actual skill, not inflating ranks, to properly match today’s level of play.
Speaking of the climb, we’re adding a Climb Indicator that appears when your visible rank is lagging behind your current MMR. A frustrating experience is being in a Plat lobby and seeing a Silver player in your games—it often feels like you have someone who shouldn’t be on your team. But the reality is that very often this player just started their climb a bit later than everyone else and actually does belong in that lobby. So this indicator will help show when someone’s rank just hasn’t caught up to their MMR.”
/dev: Ranked 2026 – Riot Dev Blog
“Lastly, we’ve got two more quick updates.
First, we’re making changes to how Flex and Solo MMR are determined. An incredibly painful experience is playing Flex with your friends in a Gold lobby and being absolutely stomped by someone who’s Gold in Flex and Master in Solo/Duo. So, we’re going to be bringing Flex ranks more in-line with Solo/Duo ranks (Flex will never pull Solo up, however.) We think this change will make Flex games feel a little more fair, while still allowing you to play with friends (within reason.)
And finally, we’re re-enabling duoing in Solo/Duo at all ranks, including Challenger, for most regions. We previously disabled Apex duos due to concerns around Rank manipulation, but with recent boosting detection and matchmaking improvements, we’re confident it can return without fear of exploitation.
That’s it for our changes for this year. We hope you’re as excited for Ranked in 2026 as we are. We’ll be monitoring queue health, match quality, and your feedback closely and refine where needed. Good luck on your climb! “
/dev: Ranked 2026 – Riot Dev Blog
The Preview Patch notes for 25.24 are here. From Riot Phroxzon via X (Source)
