/dev: 2025 Season One Gameplay Preview

The 2025 Season One gameplay changes will start hitting PBE today! Before they’re out, we wanted to talk you through the changes you’ll see 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 feedback! If you’re looking for more information on what League changing to Seasons means, check out this dev blog for more details.

Housekeeping Note: Things will be in a pretty early state when you first see them, so expect changes to things like visuals, item names, effect names, stat values, and more as we continue to refine these items while they’re on PBE. Barring massive table-flips, this preview page won't be updated after publishing. Fear not though, when the 25.S1.1 patch notes come out and the changes go live in January they'll have all the final details as usual.

What Seasons Mean for Gameplay

One quick note before we jump into gameplay, we’re changing how often your rank will reset from once per split/season to once per year. We won’t go into all the details here, but if you’re interested you can check out this dev blog for more information.

In 2024 we tried out Splits and for the most part you can expect Seasons to build off of what we learned there, but you can expect a thicker layer of paint to come with each one (more on that later). League of Legends is a game that asks you to continually adapt—we add new content and constantly retune existing champions and items while you, the players, innovate and discover new strategies that we never could’ve imagined.

We want each new Season to continue to provide interesting gameplay that will give you an opportunity to prove your mastery of the game and help you become more immersed in each season’s thematic universe. We’re not planning to do things like temporary seasonal mechanics you see in other games, because we want each change we make to be good for League in the long-term. We’ll continue to deliver our largest changes of the year in January with Season 1, with additional content in Seasons 2 and 3.

Without further ado, let’s jump into the changes you can expect to see hit the Rift come 2025 Season 1!

Noxian Invasion of the Rift

The first thing you’ll notice when loading onto the Rift this year is that we’ve brought you to Noxus. As part of Seasons, we want to make sure the connection to the theme of each Season doesn’t end as soon as you hit the “Play” button. We want to take advantage of League’s deep well of stories and lore to carry the immersion into the Rift and League’s gameplay. We crafted these map visual updates with an emphasis on maintaining competitive integrity, so whether you’re at home or playing on the professional stage you can still expect a fair playing fields.

Noxus has taken over pretty much all aspects of the Rift: the minions, turrets, and even shopkeepers will now be repping Noxus in some way! Noxian War Turrets will blast minions and champions, sporting some new targeting animations similar to what you might have seen in the ARAM map update. The shopkeepers are dressed up in the snazzy garb of the Masquerade, and the minions look like they rolled right out of the Immortal Bastion itself.

We didn’t want to change the entire map to keep some sense of familiarity and push the differences in some of the biomes. For example, the blue buff and river zones retain their lush forest vibes, while the lanes, red buff areas, and bases are going to look more like what you might find around the outskirts of Noxus Prime. These updates will remain through Season 1, with another new journey coming in Season 2.

We’re sure a bunch of you are already thinking about what that means for later in the year (winter map when?), but unfortunately we don’t have any updates on if or when the winter map will make a return. For now, we hope you’ll enjoy the Noxian views instead.

Now that we’ve covered the fresh coat of Noxian paint coming to the Rift, let’s chat more about the gameplay changes themselves.

Atakhan

This Season, we are adding an entirely new Epic Monster to the Rift. Introducing Atakhan: an ancient demon of bloodshed and violence.

Atakhan spawns at 20:00, and can appear in the river close to either top or bottom lane. Which side he spawns on depends on which has seen more champion damage and kills by 14 minutes. At 14 minutes Atakhan’s pit will spawn with two permanent walls to carve out his territory and signaling where he’ll appear for players so you have plenty of time to plan your approach for fighting this ancient demon.

But this isn’t all there is to Atakhan. The amount of champion damage and kills done in the game so far will also affect which of the two forms the demon takes on. In a higher action game you’ll see Ruinous Atakhan. If you manage to take him down, your entire team will permanently be granted increased effects from all Epic monster rewards, and he’ll leave behind a field of Blood Roses for anyone nearby to collect.

What are Blood Roses? In addition to Atakhan, we’re adding a new plant to Summoner's Rift. They act as a minor but permanent bonus you can take for your own team and deny the enemy team. They grant your entire team a small amount of XP and a permanent stacking Adaptive Force buff. Blood Roses can spawn before 20:00, and do so around areas where champions have died or around Atakhan's spawn location, in addition to as a reward for killing Ruinous Atakhan.

But back to Atakhan’s other form. In a lower action game you’ll see Voracious Atakhan and if you manage to take him down your entire team will be granted a temporary, one-time rebirth buff, similar to Akshan’s Passive where you respawn in base, and a permanent increase to gold from champion takedowns which should help give teams that extra push to take that teamfight.

With Atakhan, we wanted to create an important gameplay objective that allows players to participate more in shaping the story unique to each game on Summoner's Rift. Both team's actions, their choices to fight or not, and where and when they do, will determine Atakhan's location and form. Our goal is for this to ultimately bring more variation to each game of League in a way that will help it feel different than the last.

As a minor side note, in order to make room for Atakhan Rift Herald's spawn time has been pushed back to 16:00 and Baron Nashor's spawn time has been pushed back to 25:00. We don’t want games to last longer than they do today, and we’d make changes if we see that’s the case. Typically, teams aren’t taking Barons at 20 minutes when they spawn, so we think there’s room for another powerful mid-game objective that is more realistically claimable in Atakhan.

Feats of Strength

The next mechanic we’re introducing as we journey to Noxus are Feats of Strength. They’re a new system that’s replacing the gold rewards from First Blood and First Turret with the goal of rewarding early game advantages in a more interesting and deferred way than a simple bag of gold, but let’s get into how Feats work before we talk about why we made them.

Feats is a best-of-three system that encourages teams to take risks early on by contesting different objectives, aka Feats of Strength. They are as follows:

• First Blood

• First Tower

• First Three Epic Jungle Monsters (Drakes, Herald, any 3 Void Grubs)

Upon one team completing two of the three above Feats, they’ll have won the contest and will receive the blessing of Noxus buff. This buff will immediately grant a small bonus to any tier 2 boots belonging to players on the Feat winning team. This is retroactive, so if you already have tier 2 boots when you get Feats, they’ll get the bonus immediately. If you buy them later, they’ll also get the bonus, so don’t worry about changing up when you buy boots to get this buff. But that’s not all you get for winning!

After completing two legendary items, a player on the Feat winning team can spend gold to upgrade their boots to tier 3, which grants another small stat bonus and a unique effect depending on which boots you upgraded.

Here’s an example of what the boot upgrades look like using Plated Steelcaps:

• Free Tier 2 Boot Bonus: +5 Armor

• Tier 3 Upgrade: Costs 750 gold, but provides +5 Armor, +5 Movement Speed, and a new unique passive that, after taking physical damage from a champion, grants the owner a physical shield for 10% of their  maximum health for 5 seconds (with a 10 seconds cooldown).

Each pair of boots will come with their own unique upgrades, so this shoe store has something for everyone. Even Cassiopeia will get an upgrade for winning Feats (even if snakes can’t wear boots).

We added Feats to give players a fun, satisfying reward for getting an advantage in the early game that wasn’t just big chunks of gold that can provide very sharp swings in power. Since early game gold is very volatile and can vary in usefulness from providing a massive power spike to doing nothing at all based on item completion, Feats was made as a system to smooth out the power that is granted by winning the early game and turn what was previously just immediate gold rewards into a fun system that gives players more options later in the game if they play well early on.

Respawning Nexus Turrets

Next up we have a more straightforward change: Nexus Turret respawning. Just like inhibitors, Nexus Turrets will now respawn at full health a set amount of time after being destroyed. When they respawn they’ll have all the same properties, good as new!

Our goal with adding respawning Nexus Turrets was to help reduce the amount of games that feel hopeless just because you lost both of your turrets. It felt like you were delaying the inevitable when you needed to contest a game winning objective like Baron or Elder Dragon but not being able to leave base without a Shaco or Sion backdooring to win the game. Now, if you’re able to fend off backdoors for a period of time, you won’t have to babysit your Nexus any longer and can get back into the action.

Runes

We’re also taking the new Season as an opportunity to do housekeeping on a few Runes. Introducing Axiom Arcanist, Deep Ward, Sixth Sense, and Grisly Mementos.

Axiom Arcanist will buff your ultimate ability’s damage, healing, or shielding and refund you some cooldown on takedowns. It’ll be replacing Nullifying Orb and is intended to be a caster’s best friend. We wanted to add a rune that appealed to the caster fantasy that has a clearly defined user base that can compete with manaflow band for those who use it well as a more interesting choice for players as they load into their games.

Now for Deep Ward, Sixth Sense, and Grisly Mementos.

Deep Ward makes Stealth Wards that you place in the enemy jungle Deep, granting them +1 HP and last 30-45 seconds long (increased to +30-120 seconds for Yellow Trinket Stealth Wards). Beginning at level 11, Stealth Wards that you place in the river will also be considered Deep and grant the respective bonuses.

Sixth Sense automatically tracks a nearby enemy ward if you cannot already see / track it. If you’re a melee champion it will have a 300 second cooldown, with a 360 second cooldown for ranged users. Beginning at level 11 this rune will not only track the enemy ward, but it will also reveal it for 10 seconds giving you a chance to take it out.

Last up we have Grisly Mementos which grants an infinitely stacking 5 Trinket Ability Haste upon champion takedowns. In modes where this doesn’t make sense like ARAM the user will gain 3 Ultimate Ability Haste instead.

Deep Ward, Sixth Sense, and Grisly Mementos will be replacing Eyeball Collector, Zombie Ward, Ghost Poro will the goal of creating more exciting vision tools for players to decide between instead of more generic runes that were kept relatively safe due to their power budget being tied up in bonus Adaptive Force.

While it isn’t a sweeping overhaul of the runes, like any time we touch this system we want rune selection to be an interesting part of the pre-game preparation phase that lets you specialize how you want to approach the match.

Teleport has gotten more powerful as player skill and knowledge have increased over time. It doesn’t have a clear weakness since the winning player in lane uses it to push their advantage and the losing player relies on it as a fallback, while both also benefit from the ability to move across the map within a few seconds.

In its current state, Teleport significantly stifles action in lanes through its low cost as a “reset” button, while we think more of its power should be in its later uses that provide map impact and benefit solo lane influence on the rest of the game.

To accomplish this, Teleport will no longer instantly blink the champion after its channel. Now, they will instead visually travel across the map, with Teleport moving slower and Unleashed Teleport moving much quicker. This new mechanic allows us to tune how effective Teleport is at returning to lane in a way that doesn’t feel as bad as nerfing its channel duration or range, while also ensuring it’s still appropriately powerful later on.

Now that early Teleport has a long travel time, we're reintroducing its early capability to target wards and minions as there’s more time to react to an incoming teleport. In addition, Homeguards will now kick in from the beginning of the game, although in a weaker state before 14 minutes. This is intended to reduce the difference in time it takes between walking back to lane and teleporting so that early game pacing still feels reasonable whether one takes Teleport or not.

A 4 second blink didn’t give us much room to specifically target what we wanted to nerf about Teleport and this change should put it in a healthier spot while long-term setting us up to balance the game around it not being as impactful early. Ideally, laning should feel reasonable whether one takes the spell or not.

And that about wraps up our biggest changes coming to Season 1 next year! We hope you’re looking forward to testing them out, and make sure to check out the patch notes when they come out for all the details. See you on the Rift and good luck climbing!