A new season always brings big updates, and League of Legends is no exception. Here’s everything coming in patch note 25.09.
With a new season underway and fresh gameplay updates on the horizon, Riot Games has responded to player feedback from Season One by revealing a series of major changes to the League of Legends’ systems and overall gameplay. Let's jump right into it.
Atakhan
A big gameplay update happening in League of Legends will be with Atakhan. Just like in the cinematic "Dark Gambit", The Black Rose clan captured Atakhan. However, in Season 2, you'll know Atakhan by another name: Thornbound. The objective will keep appearing on both the top and bottom sides, depending on which side sees the most PvP action.
Killing Thornbound Atakhan will grant a new reward: the team who slays Atakhan gets any remaining Bloody Roses on the map immediately along with a bonus, and then all of their Bloody Petals are purified into Spirit Petals which grant a 25% increased effect. They are also rewarded with a Spiritual Purification buff, which means that on a takedown, they bless the area, slowing and damaging other enemies as well as granting their team a Spirit Petal.
Void Grubs and Herald
According to the developers, "the frequency and degree at which you need to think about epic monsters are too high for healthy game pacing, lane phases, and game-to-game variety". To improve the overall gameplay, some important changes are coming to League of Legends:
- Second Void Grubs spawn removed;
- The first spawn happens later in the game;
- Maximum Grub count to three instead of six;
- Rift Herald' spawn time moved to 15 minutes.
The Rift Herald will also be less tanky in the upcoming update. Riot is removing Shelly’s Gaze — the effect that reduced your damage against her — but in return, the Herald will deal more damage to players. The goal is to create faster, more straightforward encounters, especially for solo players, while still making the Herald a meaningful and risky objective.
Bounty changes
Next season, bounties won’t give out any bonus gold unless you’re clearly on the winning team, via a
measurement of gold, experience, and objectives.
For example, if you’re the 5/0 Orianna on the losing team, your fed opponents aren’t punching above their weight fighting you, they’re virtually guaranteed to claim your shutdown gold in a future team fight. This would make your comeback as Orianna even more difficult. Beginning with the next patch, you won’t be worth any more than baseline kill gold as 5/0 Orianna unless your team is more clearly winning.
Base kill gold scaling with level gives us a non-invasive, anti-snowball measure. This will start fairly small, at 250 scaling up to 400 gold instead of the baseline 300. Bounty accumulation will be delayed until after exiting combat and suppression will re-adjust all bounties every time team leads are re-calculated.
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Role Swapping and Position Binding
One of the updates coming to League of Legends will be on the role assignment. If you like to play support with the jungle item and just roam around, that is going to be impossible next season. The jungle role will automatically be assigned the Smite spell and only one will be available per team. For the Spellbook rune users, nothing will change. The same thing will happen with Supports that will be assigned the World Atlas item automatically.
Anti-lane Swap
Anti-lane swap rules will be tougher again to prevent it from happening in both competitive and standard League of Legends. Lane swap detection will activate upon seeing a World Atlas in mid or top lane between 1:35-2:15 and 1:35-3:00 minutes respectively, at which point the penalties will be placed purely on the support.
Instead of reducing all players’ minion gold and XP by 25%, the support will no longer be able to cash in their World Atlas stacks and won’t receive any gold or experience from lane minions. Detection still requires two non-junglers in the lane.
Death screen and kill streaks
Tired of the grey screen? Well, next season it won't be as grey as before. Not only will the color change a little bit, but the death screen will be different. You'll now be able to spectate a teammate and see the atrocious play he decided to do while you're waiting to come back. This won't be changing your gameplay, only entertaining you while you wait.
Inspired by VALORANT, Riot Games will be adding new sound effects to kills that should spice up League’s most satisfying moments. Only you will hear these effects. On multi-kills, the sounds will escalate to serve as your own personal hype squad.
When will these updates be available in League of Legends?
All the gameplay and system changes will be in-game in patch note 25.09 dropping on April 30. We can't wait to welcome the new Spirit Blossom season.
That's all for now. Stick around for more League of Legends news, guides, and updates on esports.gg.
