Season 1 Reveal, Gameplay Preview & Ranked Resets | Dev Update - League of Legends

Hi folks, I'm Andrei, also known as Meddler. And I'm Paul, also known as Pabro. We're back with the final Dev Update of 2024.

Today is November 8th. We just wanted to give you a warning, we will be talking about Arcane spoilers in our first section. So if you haven't finished the finale, skip to the time on the screen.

Okay, spoiler disclaimer out of the way. Let's take a moment to talk about Arcane. It's been such an amazing journey to watch the story play out.

And, like many of you, we’re sad it's over. But don't worry, we do still have a few more things in store on the game side. When we got started on Season One, we got to watch the champions in Arcane live out stories we'd already seen only a little bit of, or in some cases, we got to really flesh out the backstory of some older champions.

With Season One, Caitlyn received a visual update to better align the game and the show. And for Season Two, we're doing something similar for Viktor. And tomorrow you'll see his update hit PBE.

We’re not pulling a Gangplank– and disabling him because he's dead. Well hold on. .

. I think you're on to something with killing Gangplank and other characters. .

. Nnnnoooooooo. Okay.

Anyway, we wanted to better represent his evolved, powered up form we saw on Arcane and the personality that goes along with it. Viktor's update is primarily focused on updating his visuals, audio, and backstory. We want to showcase the striking evolution and changes you just saw him go through on the show.

So we're going to keep the gameplay, you know and love –– with a slight change to his ultimate. The ult will still function largely the way it does now, but it'll get bigger with every kill until the ult is over. We wanted to mirror the feeling from Arcane, where he manifests a massive, growing storm that consumes everything around him.

We also updated all of Viktor's skins. We do want to point out that because of the updates to Prototype Viktor, his price will be increasing from 520 RP to 750 RP. So if you want to get him at the cheaper price, make sure you get it before his updates go live.

All right, that's it for the Arcane spoilers, so right now we'll hand things over to Steph and Chad to talk about Seasons. Hey everyone, I'm Chad, aka Mackivor, I'm the Seasons Lead on League of Legends. And I'm Steph, aka 100 pc nuggets, or the Cosmetics Lead.

In the last Dev Update, Meddler and Pabro mentioned we're introducing thematic Seasons. So today we're here to talk more about what a Season is, what to expect to the theme, and what the experience is going to be like both on and off the Rift. Over the years, we fleshed out the world and regions over Runterra, as well as various alternate universes like Star Guardian, High Noon, or Dark Star.

We've highlighted these worlds in moments like summer events or narrative drops around champion releases. Now we want to take that immersion further with our new Seasons. So next year we're going to have three Seasons, each around 8 patches long, where we're going to follow champions around different regions of Runterra.

Each one is going to have its own theme, but we're going to have an overarching narrative that connects them throughout 2025. And each Season's theme will be the anchor for most of the content going into the game as well. In the past, you've had these big releases like SWARM or Spirit of Hearth-Home.

They're super memorable and fun, but they're also not connected to a larger, integrated moment. And in Seasons, we want everything to connect together. That means things like gameplay updates, modes, mini-games, and champions will mainly have a strong tie to the Season’s theme.

We'll have a bunch of skins that celebrate that seasonal theme, but we’ll also continue to invest in a wide variety of skin lines that are unrelated to the Season as well. So expect to see cosmetics celebrating Lunar Revel or things like Bees. Ultimately, our goal is to immerse you in the parts of the world that you’re visiting from the moment you open the client, to the moment you see the Victory screen, and everything in between.

So enough tiptoeing around it. We know that you want to know what Season One is. So for our first ever Season, we are headed to the land of strength and domination: Noxus.

Hey everyone! I’m Riot Phroxzon, Lead Gameplay Designer for League. And I’m Riot Auberaun, Product Lead of the Summoner’s Rift Team.

Next year, when you step onto the Rift, it'll look a little bit different than you're used to. We want Seasons to be a way you can immerse yourself in League, especially once you load onto the Rift. So we've a preview of some of the updates you can expect in Season One of 2025.

We're headed to everyone's favorite region of fierce fighters, cloak-and-dagger magic, and strength above all. Prepare to be. .

. decimated! Beyond the Noxian invasion of the map, we've also made some gameplay improvements and changes for next year.

First, it wouldn't be a new Season without an overhaul to the item system. Just kidding. But there are some Noxian-themed boot upgrades, but it's not as simple as picking them up from the shop.

In fact, they come along with a new mechanic: Feats of Strength. There are three objectives that your team can claim throughout the game: First blood, first tower, and first three epic jungle monsters. If your team is the first to complete two of these three objectives –– so for example, first blood and first tower, your tier 2 boots will transform into new versions with slightly better stats.

You'll also get access to powerful Noxus-themed boots, which you can purchase as a final upgrade. We want Feats of Strength to celebrate early game successes without immediately snowballing the game out of control. We're experimenting with different types of power progression to see how it feels for a reward in the early game, to open up more choices in the late game.

We're also introducing Nexus turret respawning. An incredibly frustrating experience is just winning a late-game team fight only to lose your Nexus turrets. You kept the game alive, but at what cost?

Now it feels like your team is doomed to hang around in your base for another 200 years babysitting an open Nexus. To give your team a better chance to coming back from these situations, your Nexus turrets will now respawn after a set time once they’re destroyed. Now your team can rally for an epic comeback without having to worry about a backdoor Kassadin.

We're also adding some new minor runes to rebalance some of the vision related options in the Domination tree. Sixth Sense, Grisly Memento, and Deep Ward. As well as a new addition to the Sorcery tree called Axiom Arcanist, which makes ultimates more powerful.

We also couldn't resist changing items just a little bit, so we're adding some small scope adjustments to tank items and adding a new item called Bloodletter’s Curse. Well, new-ish. It'll look familiar if you've spent time in Arena, but if you haven't, Bloodletter’s Curse reduces the target's magic resistance from repeated spell hits, which is sort of like an AP version of Black Cleaver.

Finally, let's dig into the biggest update of the Season: Atakhan, Bringer of Ruin. The new epic jungle monster is drawn to death and destruction. He will spawn only once at 20 minutes, on either the top or bottom side of the map, whichever side has seen the most champion damage and kills by 14 minutes.

To signal where he'll make his entrance, Atakhan’s arena will spawn, adding new permanent walls to that side of the map. Atakhan’s dark influence will also cause Blood Roses to grow periodically in the areas where champions have been killed. More death means more roses.

Blood Roses drop Bloody Petals for your entire team, which stack any number of times and last through the entire game. For each petal collected, your whole team gains a small experience and power boost. So if you see one, grab it.

Atakhan has two forms: Ruinous and Voracious. Higher action game spawn Ruinous Atakhan, who you might want to fight up close and personal to avoid his constricting rings of damage, which creates the perfect chance for an ace and a steal. Killing Ruinous Atakhan grants Bloody Petals to the team who kills him, and spawns a grove of Blood Roses in the area for anyone to collect.

Voracious Atakhan spawns in lower action games. He does less damage to his enemies, but as his name implies, is hungry. As his health gets lower, he gets an increasingly more powerful drain ability based on missing health.

The team who takes down Voracious Atakhan gets a one-time rebirth buff, similar to Guardian Angel. So now you really have a reason to force that teamfight. We're introducing Atakhan for a couple of reasons.

First, unless you're T1, a 20-minute Baron is pretty tough to get. So we're moving Baron’s spawn back to 25 minutes, and providing another mid-game macro option in the form of Atakhan. Second, based on how Atakhan plays out each game, we hope to see more different and interesting game states in both mid- and late-game.

And, we feel that designing an objective whose spawn location, form, and rewards are decided by how you play should make each game of League feel more varied. Our goal is for every gameplay change to make League better. As we move to Seasons, this remains the same, so these changes were designed for the long term.

That said, we'll keep an eye on how they're landing and make adjustments if needed. But for now, Atakhan and all the other updates are here to stay for good. We can't wait to see how these go as you start your climbs next year.

As part of building Seasons, we took a look at how rewards would be part of the overall Seasonal experience. That led us to updating our reward systems. That means things like event passes, champion mastery, honor rewards, etc.

We felt that this was a great time to address some problems that have built up. We're going to dive into those details, so bear with us. First, over the years, these systems have become needlessly complex, with an excessive number of currencies, unnecessary steps to craft and claim rewards, overlapping loot types.

We could go on. Being given some key fragments that you have to then craft into a key that you pair with a chest that you open up to get another key and a chest and some essence that you open up to get a skin shard, that you pay some orange essence for or reroll to eventually get a random skin. That’s sort of level of unnecessary complexity going on.

Secondly, those systems are all scattered throughout the client. What you can earn, how and where you can track it, etc. sucks.

And third, events and their rewards being only sometimes available makes some moments less rewarding to play League. So here are some of the changes we’re making. There will always be a Battle Pass active with both a free and a paid track, with the price the same as an Event Pass today.

You'll get Pass rewards through the tracks, meaning we're removing the Event Tokens and Shop. There will be two passes per Season with them tying into each Season's thematic. That means most of the rewards reflect what's going on in and around the game, and fewer random rewards.

We’ll have the same number of passes per year at six, with a longer average duration per pass. We’re also moving most of our scattered reward systems to the free track of those Battle Passes. So most rewards will now be in one place, with systems like Honor and Champion Mastery feeding into the pass.

For example, having a higher honor level will give bonus to past experience earned. You can earn 12 skins per year with the free pass. Half of these skins will be themed to the Season you unlock them in.

We'll also be simplifying the loot and crafting system. Orbs will always be available, so Masterwork Chests, for example, will get phased out since they serve such a similar purpose. Overall, we want the pass to be the core vessel for how you track and earn rewards.

If you choose to buy the paid version, we also want it to be very clear, what you're getting and how to make the most of it. Now these elements have a ton of moving parts to them. There's a lot more details on what we've talked about just here.

We'll cover that all in the dev blog that's out right now. Switching gears a bit, I want to talk about another change for next year that isn't quite tied to Seasons, but instead by feedback from all of you: Ranked Resets. These have been a topic of a lot of conversation in recent years, particularly when it comes to feelings around how often you want to restart your climbs, how fast the climb should be, what feels rewarding versus what feels like a grind, etc.

And looking back, we don't think two or three resets a year has been the right call for League. So. .

. we’re moving to six per year. Okay.

Just kidding. Please put down the pitchforks. We're going back to one large reset at the start of each year, with no additional resets during the year.

Ranked system tuning in terms of the size of the January reset, the number of the games to climb on average, and other systems will be similar to the numbers we used back in 2022 and before. That said, there will still be 3 Victorious skins you can earn –– one for each Season. If you want to earn each skin, you will need to win 15 Ranked games during that Season.

Again though, neither your visible rank nor your MMR will reset except in January. Next up, we want to chat about a potential replacement for Quickplay that we'll be trying in some regions. It's called Swiftplay, and it's meant to be a lower stakes experience than Summoner’s Rift, though with more strategic elements than you'd find in, for example, ARAM.

You'll still have the same core elements that you'd expect to find in a game of Summoner’s Rift, you know, farming, snowballing, team fighting for objectives, etc. but with added changes to keep all players more competitive like ramping gold and XP as the game goes on, These changes won't make it so you can suddenly jump ahead of your opponent, if you’re 0/10, but they will make it so that even if you're down, you're never completely out of the game. The fact that Swiftplay is also less punishing when behind should also make the mode ideal for those of you looking to play with friends, you wouldn't be willing to put your LP on the line for.

As mentioned, Swiftplay will be rolling out in January to replace Quickplay in select regions, so we hope you'll give it a try and let us know what you think when it hits live. We also have a blog dropping today with more details, so be sure to check that out. And last but hopefully not least, we've got some changes coming to the Practice Tool.

Over the years, you've told us that it's a useful but somewhat limited way to get better League. The most common desire we've seen people bring up is to practice with other players, whether it's in one-on-one duels with a friend or on a full teamfight drill with a premade team. Practice Tool wasn't built with multiplayer in mind, and we've had some cautions about how League could be a lot less fun if the optimal way to get better is to spend almost all your time in a Practice Tool rather than playing real games.

But we do think we've likely been too cautious here, so we're going to be giving Multiplayer Practice Tool a try. You should see that on the PBE soon. It's an experimental feature, and we'll probably encounter an interesting range of bugs.

That said, though, we're looking into whether we can ship it as part of Season start in January. And if that's not on track, we'll give you an update as to where it's up to. Before we wrap up, one last Season's thing.

We'll be changing up how we name patches to match Seasons, so instead of patch 15. 1 coming out in January, it'll be patch 25. S1.

1 calling out the year, Season, and patch number. Season 2 will then kick off and patch 25. S2.

1, you get the idea. Okay, that is it from us today. The next time you hear from us will be in January at the start of the Season.

We'll be back then to share some extra stuff that'll come out later in Season One. We do want to acknowledge, though, that we've covered most of the big changes you'll see day one next year. That's said, we’ve still got a few surprises left.

And of course we'll have the cinematic to kick things off. To no one's surprise, we can confirm that it’s also going to focus a lot on Noxus and Noxian champions, but that's all we can share for now. We hope you all have a great December, great holiday season, and a happy New Year.

Thanks so much for everything and we'll talk to you again soon. Bye!