/dev: Season 2 Gameplay Changes Preview

In Season 2 this year, we’re heading to Ionia. Not only does this mean a new, beautiful Ionian Spirit Blossom-inspired map, but also a round of Seasonal game updates!

We’re looking to polish up the changes we shipped with Season 1 while also modernizing some non-gameplay systems. 

On the gameplay side, Atakhan’s forms will be consolidated into a single new one: Thornbound, we’ll be slowing down the pace of objectives in the game by only spawning grubs once (with some bonus changes to the Rift Herald), and we’re continuing to tweak bounties to make extra sure that they only appear on a team that is already winning. 

Some other improvements you’ll see headed into Season 2 are a new death screen, on-kill sound stingers, and role swapping in champ select. Let’s dive in!

Spirit Blossom Rift

As Vladimir said, off to Ionia then! Here’s a peek at our brand new, Spirit Blossom-themed version of Summoner’s Rift. Just like in Season 1, we didn’t make any changes to the terrain, so this change is purely cosmetic.

Atakhan

As we saw at the end of Season 1 (and in the Demon’s Hand metagame), LeBlanc and the Black Rose have recaptured the demon Atakhan, aiming to use him for something nefarious. Atakhan will now be locked to a single new form—Thornbound—representing his capture. But the Spirit Blossom Rift isn’t taking kindly to his corruption, so when you slay Atakhan, you help purge his influence completely from the map.

We heard your feedback around Voracious Atakhan, and we agree. It’s been challenging to balance Voracious Atakhan’s reward in a way that feels satisfying and fair, as well as getting a reasonable mix of Voracious and Ruinous in Pro. Additionally, we thought that a single form would pull back on some of the complexity we added in Season 1 through two separate Atakhan forms. We also saw an opportunity to evolve Ruinous Atakhan in a way that ties into the current narrative, so let us know what you think!

Just like in Season 1, Atakhan will spawn either on the top or bottom side of the map, depending on which side sees the most PvP action. He will also still spawn Bloody Roses near where kills have happened and around his own pit. That said, 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 25% increased effect. 

Secondly, they’re also rewarded with the Spiritual Purification buff for the rest of the game. This means that on takedown, they bless the area, slowing and damaging other enemies as well as granting their team a Spirit Petal.

Void Objective Pacing

Throughout Season 1 we've heard feedback that neutral objectives have become too demanding, especially in early-to-mid game. The frequency and degree at which you need to think about epic monsters is too high for healthy game pacing, lane phases, and game-to-game variety.

The first change we're making to address this is removing the second Void Grub spawn. The first (and now only) Grub spawn happens later, to allow for players to focus more on the early laning phase. Void Grub rewards have also been re-tuned for a max Grub count of 3 rather than 6. Now, you’ll be capped at 1 Void Mite which you get after taking down 3 Grubs. Rift Herald's spawn time has also moved a bit earlier to 15 minutes, so spawn times are better spaced out before the 20 minute mark.

While we do want Rift Herald to encourage bringing a teammate, the degree to which it demands multiple teammates to take is higher than it needs to be. To address this, and generally make it less complex and sloggy, we've removed Shelly’s Gaze effect (the debuff that reduced the damage you dealt to her), while increasing her damage dealt. The result should be simpler, faster encounters, especially when solo, but at a higher HP cost to keep Herald contestable.

Given that Rift Herald now carries a larger portion of midgame objective interest, we've also used the opportunity to do a QoL pass on her rewards to make them easier and more satisfying to use (check the patch 25.09 notes for the final changelist).

Bounty Changes

We’re also going to be re-tuning the bounty system this Season by suppressing champion bounties (unless we’re confident your team is winning), adjusting base kill gold to scale with champion level, and making a few small updates to make the system feel more polished.

We believe that champion bounties should only be present when they’re clearly helping a losing team come back. Though the underlying drivers (takedowns and farming) aren’t changing, bounties won’t give out any bonus gold now unless you’re clearly on the winning team, via a measurement of gold, experience, and objectives. 

We’re doing this for two primary reasons: First off, we think it’s important that winning players can snowball ahead and have the opportunity to dominate the game. Second, we also think it’s important that losing players have a chance to claw their way back into contention by doing something proactive, not just cowering underneath their turrets. That’s why we like rewarding players for taking down someone stronger than you and it’s why bounties are in the game. 

To show this in action, 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 teamfight. 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 through a combination of gold, experience, and objectives.

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. Since winning teams tend to be higher level than losing ones, this slightly weights the payouts for champion combat toward the losing team. It’s not a super strong force, but one that reinforces the idea of rewarding the underdog without making snowballing players any weaker.

Finally, we’re fixing a few small bugs with the system overall. The older bounty system from last year didn’t increment shutdown gold until after leaving champion combat. Since it can feel weird to suddenly put a bounty on your head simply because you got the kill before they did, we’re once again delaying bounty accumulation until after exiting combat. The second fix is around how bounty suppression works: Under the hood, bounties are only updated when champions themselves changed their own bounty calculation (usually by killing something), which meant suppression would lag behind until that kill took place. We’re now making sure suppression re-adjusts all bounties every time team leads are re-calculated.

Role Swapping & Position Binding

We’re also making some small, but important, changes to the jungle and support roles: Jungle will be auto-assigned smite and only one smite will be allowed per team (don’t worry Spellbook enjoyers, your smite is unaffected). In a similar vein, support players will now automatically be given World Atlas as their starting item.

These changes won’t make a big difference gameplay-wise, but they should lead to less trolling and “Oops, my team doesn’t have Smite, RIP” moments. More importantly, they also allow us to streamline rules that exist purely to stop the funnel and multiple support item strategies, which have proven themselves to be unhealthy for League many times over. For that reason, we won’t be looking for ways to maintain or support these types of strategies.

To make sure you can arrange your team in light of these new rules, we’re adding the ability to swap roles with other players in champ select. That means if you are assigned mid and agree to switch roles with your support, you can swap and play support as you normally would: last hitting cannons because your ADC can’t be trusted to.

Additional Tuning to Anti-Lane Swap Rules

We’ll also be revisiting how we tackle lane swaps with the above changes in mind. Our hope from re-designing the lane swap detection and penalty is to keep Pro play lane swapping at nearly zero while continuing to reduce its impact on regular players. We still want supports to be able to roam into mid or top lane and pull off a gank, but without penalizing their teammate’s income.

Therefore, we’ll be using role binding as an opportunity to tie our anti-lane swap rules to World Atlas. Same as before, these rules only take effect on teams with a jungler and the detection is looking for support plus another champion in a non-bot lane. 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.

What are the penalties? Defending players will still receive perfect gold and experience from nearby minions and the defending turret will still take reduced damage and deal bonus damage in these contexts. But 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, so Zyra holding the mid wave won’t be penalized, but once Lissandra returns from her bathroom break, the support will have to leave.

Death Screen

So you died. We can’t go back and hit Zhonya’s for you, but we can make some small changes to the death screen that might make the experience a little less miserable. First, we’re adding some color back. Goodbye grey screen, hello slightly-less-grey screen.

We’re also adding a teammate spectate UI to “change the channel” so you can check out the top lane noodle fight or whatever nonsense is going on bot. This aligns with how lots of players already spend their downtime; pinging summoners, buying, or panning around the map. Not a huge change, just a little QoL improvement to keep you entertained until you respawn. Heads up, this replaces the Eternals death UI, but you’ll still get other related notifications.

Kill Streaks

League has plenty of flashy visuals that punctuate the moment you get a kill, but in the heat of a teamfight, our announcer can lag behind the action. Even if you’re racking up multi-kills, other events can muddy the soundtrack of your rampage.

Inspired by Valorant, we’re adding some sweet, but subtle, sound effects to kills that should spice up League’s most satisfying moments. These will play for your ears only. On multi-kills, the sounds will escalate to serve as your own personal hype squad as you chase a 360 no-scope penta.

And that’s a quick summary of the bigger changes you can expect to see come Patch 25.09! We’re excited for all of you to drop onto the new, Spirit Blossom-inspired Rift and test them out. As per usual, things may change slightly between their release on PBE and Live, so always check out the patch notes for the final change list. 

We’ll be keeping an eye out for your feedback to make further adjustments as needed, but for now we hope you’ll all enjoy Season 2—see you on the Rift!