Season 2026 Dev blog

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.

The 2026 Season One gameplay changes hit PBE today! Before they’re live, we wanted to talk you through the changes coming to Summoner’s Rift. We’re eager to hear your feedback, so make sure to hop onto PBE to test these updates out and give us your thoughts!

Housekeeping Note: Work is still in progress on this first reveal, so don’t be surprised to see changes to things like visuals, item names, effect names, stat values, and more as we continue to refine these while they’re on PBE. Barring massive table-flips, this preview page won’t be updated after publishing. Fear not though, when the 26.1 patch notes come out and the changes go live in January they’ll have all the final details as usual.

Major Goals

Before we get into the specifics of the changes we first wanted to cover some of the high level goals we had for gameplay going into Season 1.

Over the last few years, League’s been largely about teamfighting over neutral objectives: fighting around grubs, dragons, Baron, or that vision ward you just placed. While we know 5v5s make for some of the highest highs in League, we want to swing back towards a state where more strategies—like splitting and sieging—are viable in 2026. To that end, we’re making some changes to major neutral objectives, towers, and minions in order to do just that.

Another of our major goals is to balance role agency so that each role has an appropriate impact on the outcome of each game—because right now, some roles like jungle and support are much more influential.

While the two aforementioned goals are where we focused most, we also have a few other gameplay changes designed to reduce objective fatigue, get you into the action faster, improve class satisfaction, and more!

Time to Game

Starting in January you’ll get into the action faster, 35 seconds faster to be exact (if you aren’t counting invades). Right now it takes 65 seconds for minions to spawn, and we’re lowering that to 30 seconds. The first monster spawns, from Raptors to Rift Scuttler, are also brought forward by 35 seconds. This means less time AFK’ing under tower and laning phase starting a bit faster than it does today. No need to worry if you love to invade. You’ll still be able to pull them off, you’ll just need to be more decisive about committing to them as soon as the game begins.

Objectives

Atakhan was one of the biggest additions to the Rift this year, and was a unique objective to fight over. That said, he contributed to objective overload, which many of you cited as an issue since January.

We tried to alleviate this overload by removing his second form and the second set of Grubs earlier this year, but we don’t think it was enough. So, like Zaahen just did, we’re cutting Atakhan out of the game, which includes the Blood Roses and Petals that came with him. With Atakhan Ata-gone, Baron will now return to spawning at 20 minutes.

On the topic of reducing objective fatigue, we’re also making the call to remove Feats of Strength from the game.

We liked that they pushed teams to progress the game and provided goals to rally around, but think we can create better gameplay systems that allow for you to have more individual agency over your games. With Feats getting the boot, we’re adding back gold rewards for first blood and first turret at 100 and 300 gold, respectively.

With Atakhan and Feats out of the picture, we’re turning our attention to other objectives. Epic monsters should be a commitment that bears risk due to being exposed, but not so directly threatening that losing teams can’t attempt to sneak one from under their opponents’ noses.

To do this, we’re making all epic monsters about 15% more durable and increasing the durability gained from Dragon Vengeance, which stacks up the more dragon buffs a team has. These durability increases have been paired with damage reductions in almost all cases. Our goal here is to make it easier for teams on the backfoot to contest epic monsters or trade something meaningful on the other side of the map.

We’re also adjusting their rewards to be worth the time and risk, but otherwise put their power into the buffs they provide.

For most epic monsters, this is a decrease in gold and a mix of buffs and nerfs to how much experience they give. Voidgrubs and Rift Herald will have slightly stronger effects. At the same time, we’re also making comeback experience stronger for the dragons and Baron Nashor, meaning they can more often lead to comebacks for the losing team in case they come together for a sneaky kill or an epic steal.

Finally, we also did some under-the-hood cleanup of how epic monsters scale. They all level up alongside champions, and now use that level to derive all of their stats, instead of scaling with game time. This restructuring should make them more consistent across game modes and features like Multiplayer Practice Tool, so you can practice your objective fights in more realistic scenarios.

Vision

First and foremost, we wanted to give more opportunities and power to wards dropped by pushing champions, especially for mid and top laners who are side-laning later in the game. We also wanted to make it easier to learn how to effectively ward the map by creating clear and immediate value for getting vision, and give broader access to vision for more positions, which is largely monopolized by supports today.

The biggest (and brightest) change we have here is the introduction of Faelights, special locations that, if you place a ward in them, grant extra vision beyond a ward’s typical range. Faelights are set in predetermined locations with some spawning at the beginning of the game and more appearing when the Elemental Rift transforms. While these will make controlling vision in some areas easier, we made sure to limit the bonus vision duration and leave some space for junglers or roaming champions to sneak around them.

Additionally, we’re hastening the recharge rates of yellow trinkets so they’re available more consistently, and adding some additional Scryer’s Blooms onto the map that will be particularly helpful when trying to safely exit your base when behind or when you’re split pushing in a side-lane in the late game.

Pushing

Depending on who you ask—and if they’re Yorick, Fiora, Tryndamere, etc.—some might say splitpushing is the best strategy in League. Or if they’re a Ziggs, Xerath, or Caitlyn they might argue that sieging towers is the ideal way. While we aren’t here today to say which strategy is best, we do want to acknowledge that splitting and sieging aren’t currently in great states, so we want to make them more viable in 2026.

While earlier changes we discussed like additional vision and no Atakhan should help make pushing more viable to some degree, we’re introducing a new mechanic to reward these strategies.

Crystalline Overgrowth is a new feature that builds up on towers over time and, when hit, will be consumed to deal an extra burst of damage to turrets. This new mechanic should allow champions of any role or class to make some pushing progress if they find themselves in a good situation for it.

Due to the increased visual complexity of Crystalline Overgrowth and the fact that it’s essentially “Demolish for everyone,” Demolish the rune will be simplified to deal bonus damage to towers when you hit them three times in a row. This should make it easier to take a plate or two with each split or siege you attempt.

Speaking of plates, we want to create more piecemeal rewards for pushing, so they’ve been updated to stick around permanently, and will also be added to inner and inhibitor turrets, spreading out the current gold for taking a tower across each plate. So no matter what state the turret’s in, you’re likely to mine some gold out of aggressive actions.

Another change we have coming is improvements to Homeguards, especially in the mid to late game. The enhanced movement speed from Homeguards will persist until you reach your outer turret, and once the laning phase is over, that will extend to the farthest pushed minion in each lane. So you’ll be able to catch up to waves faster if you’re trying to splitpush or regroup with your team more quickly if they’re sieging. Just make sure you’re running up the lane because the speed boost will fall off if you leave your lane and go into the jungle or river.

We’re also simplifying turret rules. Instead of minions and ranged champions dealing 17% less damage to turret plates, all turrets simply take 20% increased damage from melee champions and have their health increased to match, which is nearly identical in practice, but easier to understand and now applies to more than just outer turrets. As another simplification to reward pushing, Inner turrets no longer slowly gain resists after 15 minutes, and outer turrets won’t gain quite as much AD in the mid and late-game if they’re still standing somehow.

We’re also ramping up minion respawn rates in the mid and late game to give more frequent access to sieging turrets and pushing opportunities, and ultimately chances to pick off these new plates.

After laning phase is over, minions will spawn every 25 seconds instead of every 30. In order to not inflate gold and experience income in the mid game, one fewer melee minion spawns whenever a cannon spawns in these midgame waves.

In the late game, minions will spawn every 20 seconds with one fewer caster minion as well. As super minions will now spawn with every wave once an Inhibitor dies, Inhibitor kills will create substantially more pressure than before, which will make pushing into the enemy base more rewarding.

We like that the Nexus towers respawning allows a team who’s able to hold on to an exposed Nexus a chance to leave their base without worrying about a Twitch backdoor, but with a full-health respawn, it was sometimes incorrect to kill them in the first place. So starting next year, Nexus turrets will respawn with 40% health, which should be healthy enough to prevent backdoors but weak enough that you never have to question whether it’d be better to just leave it standing at low HP instead.

Items

Next year, we’re going to bring a few items to the Rift for each class to give them some shiny new toys, including bringing back a few familiar favorites like Hextech Gunblade.

We took a hard look at which sub-classes didn’t feel like they were getting enough support from the current item system and worked to fill those spaces, so we’re hoping many champions have at least one of the 9 new items they can get excited about!

Here’s a quick list of the new items with their temp names (so don’t get too attached), as well as a quick idea of how each will fit into the item system:

• Scepter of Bonking: An AP Fighter Sheen item that doubles your on-hits, letting some AP fighters with powerful on-hits in their kit pop off by skipping forward one hit of Diana’s passive or getting an extra Snippy stack for Gwen’s Q.
• Emblem of All-Inning: A Zeal item for ADCs that like to ult and pop off. This item gives ultimate ability haste plus a burst of attack speed and guaranteed critical strikes for three attacks after ulting. If you would’ve already crit on these autos, instead you get some bonus true damage.
• Blood Sphere: This AD omnivamp item also gives some Tenacity and Haste that scales with your bonus AD. For light fighters, this should be the lategame sustain item of choice, particularly since it gives a large amount of extra omnivamp after you get a takedown to help you pop off in teamfights.
• Assassin Item: For AD assassins, this item offers a way to help end the game. Whenever you get a takedown, it grants a buff that makes your next attack against an epic monster or tower deal a large amount of damage over time scaling with your lethality, making it so that ahead AD assassins can close games out if they’re successfully assassinating their targets. It also gives some extra true damage to a spell every so often based on your lethality.
• Mananomicon: An item with a new active! The first one in a while, this AP item can be activated to enter an empowered state for a short duration where you consume significantly more mana but your spells are more powerful and have lower cooldowns. The extra damage, healing, and shielding on your spells scales with your mana, so you’re rewarded for investing into it.
• Snowbow: This is a long-range item for ADCs. It increases your attack damage based on how far away you are from your target and on takedowns, you also get a large amount of extra attack range for a while to help clean up teamfights.
• Buff Engine: An aura item with a bit of gameplay. This is an attack speed aura item for tanky melee supports that turns on the aura for a while after you slow or immobilize an enemy. The duration is much longer for melee champions than ranged, so it’s easier to maintain the attack speed for your team if you’re a tanky melee support.
• Mantle of the Twelfth Hour: A lifeline item for tanks, this item gives a large heal-over-time effect when you get low that scales off of your bonus armor and magic resistance. While you’re healing off this item, you also gain some movement speed and tenacity to enable you to go forward and tank more for your team or try to escape to make it out after you were chunked to low health.
• Savior’s Manabell + Superbell: This two-item set is a new upgradeable Tear item for enchanters. Manabell grants heal and shield power based on your mana, and when upgraded into Superbell at maximum Tear stacks it also heals your lowest nearby ally every second while you’re in combat with enemy champions, scaling the heal based on your mana.
• Hextech Gunblade: One of League’s signature hybrid items, Gunblade gives both AP and AD, spell vamp and lifesteal, and a targeted active dealing damage and slowing the target.
• Stormrazor: Stormrazor returns as an Attack Damage, Critical Strike Chance, and Attack Speed item with an Energized effect that deals damage and grants movement speed when primed.

Role Quests

Let’s get into our biggest change coming in 2026: role quests.

In January, top, bot, and mid will receive their own “quests” that reward unique power—similar to jungle pet evolutions or support item upgrades. Your quest is decided by which role you’re assigned in the lobby, so if you and a friend (or stranger) trade roles make sure you do an official role swap in champ select.

You’ll progress these new quests by killing minions, champions, plates, towers, or epic objectives–all the things you’d normally be doing in a game, and you’ll progress even faster by doing these in your assigned lane. We expect quest completion times to vary, but everyone should be completing them around the time support items upgrade now.

Our biggest goal with role quests was to increase each role’s satisfaction and make each feel like they have a unique way to engage with and influence that game. At the same time, this gives us a chance to buff top and bot lane relative to the others, as they’re currently the two weakest roles. So as a heads up those quests are going to be comparatively stronger.

Now let’s get into the rewards which will be granted in a new role-quest slot.

Top laners haven’t had appropriate agency over their games, even if they won their lane, and that’s something we’d like to change. We expect Top Laners to get the most overall influence over the game from their Role Quest of any position, offsetting the naturally low impact of the position.

Upon quest completion, top laners will gain a longer cooldown version of Summoner Teleport for free, on top of the two summoners they already chose. If you already took Teleport, instead it’ll get stronger, providing a large max-health shield on use. In addition to the summoner spell upgrade, top laners will also receive up-front bonus experience, more experience from future sources, and an increased level cap.

Now, to mid lane. A huge variety of champions can be played there, so we wanted this reward to be good for a wide variety of champion classes.

Upon completing their quest, mid laners will receive a free tier 3 boot upgrade like the ones you could buy with Feats, as well as an empowered 4-second recall with a cooldown. A few of these boots have had some modifications but mostly look similar to the ones you already know from the live game.

Rounding it out for new quests, bot lane will lean even harder into the “carry” fantasy of the role, and while top laners are getting more experience, bot laners will get a lot more gold.

Upon completing their quest, bot laners will get a lump sum plus increased gold from minion kills, champion kills, and assists for the rest of the game. You might be asking yourself, “what will I do with all this gold?” Well your new seventh item slot will hold your boots, allowing you to pick up another legendary for even harder ultra-late scaling. Even if you don’t reach a new seven item build, the room to occasionally fit a work-in-progress Zeal or Cloak of Agility ensures even your mid-game is stronger, too.

And in addition, even before feats are completed, everyone’s base crit damage is moving back up to 200%!

Jungle and support already have quests and rewards, but we still wanted to take this opportunity to make some changes to them. They’ll receive a few new toys, but also some adjustments and nerfs to help them be a little less dominant in the new season.

Jungle is, by far, the strongest role in the game right now, especially when it comes to early map influence. So we’re slightly lowering the speed of early game clears to give lane matchups a little bit more time to play out uninterrupted.

Their role quest is still getting the pet upgrade and PVP Smite like before. In addition, completing their quest will also give junglers increased gold and XP from large monsters, as well as bonus movement speed in the jungle. While not exactly quest related, we’re making it harder for non-junglers to steal objectives by increasing their resists and making Smite deal more damage so you should see fewer Lux lasers and Varus arrows stealing objectives next year. It’s still your team’s fault if they don’t keep the enemy junglers out of the pit, though.

Similar to jungle, we think support is already plenty powerful and has a very functional role quest, so we focused more on quality of life and less on direct buffs.

Upon quest completion, supports will have a new slot exclusively for control wards, discounts on those control wards, and more passive gold generation so they can do more than just buy a Redemption before the game ends.

Overall we want these quests to represent meaningful power that leans into the unique strengths of each role, informing how they can scale and give them each unique strengths to support their team for the rest of the game. The increased quest progress for interacting in a champion’s assigned lane also allows us to delete the Lane Swap Detection mechanic we added last year to combat Pro laneswapping.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on how quests land and how powerful each role feels after these changes, so please share your experiences with us!

And that takes us through the 2026 gameplay changes you’ll be seeing in January! That was a bunch of information to cover, but we’re excited to deliver on the goals we mentioned at the top of this blog and we think it’ll help move League into a better direction going forward.

We’ll be keeping an eye on how these changes play out over PBE and when they go live in January and make adjustments as needed, but for now we hope you’re starting to cook up some fun strategies for next year and we’ll see you on the Rift!