Patch 25.05 Notes

Grand Reckoning Draven, Grand Reckoning Rell, Grand Reckoning Talon, Grand Reckoning Sion, and Prestige Triumphant General Darius will be available March 5th, 2025 at 20:00:00 UTC.

Arena will be available in EUW, EUN, RU, MEA, and TR at 8AM PT (16:00:00 UTC) on March 5th, 2025. Then in ALL Riot Regions at 11 am PT (19:00:00 UTC) on March 5th 2025.

Recently, we've made a number of changes that didn't hit the mark for everyone. We've been listening to your feedback, and it's clear that there are areas where we need to adjust.

So we're making some updates to ensure League is a game that feels rewarding and worth your time. A few of these changes you'll see go live in this patch, but others will take us a bit more time to get ready for you.

We go into more detail about these changes in our most recent Dev Update video and blog so we strongly encourage you to check those out, but here's a TL;DR of what's changing:

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• 25.05 - 10 Hextech Chests and Keys—8 on the free Pass, 2 additional with Honor (up to 60/year) - Chests from both the Pass and from Honor will be the exact same Chests as the ones you got through Champ Mastery. The 2 Hextech Chests from Honor will be coming in Patch 25.06.
• 25.05 - Hextech Chests will be replacing the free Battle Pass skin.
• 25.05 - The Blue Essence cost of all champions will be reduced by 50%.
• 25.05 - Adding 25 Mythic Essence to the paid Battle Pass to replace one paid pass skin.
• 25.05 - Clash is going back to a monthly cadence.
• 25.06 - Your Shop is coming back as originally planned.
• 25.07 - The Blue Essence Emporium will return as originally planned.
• Sometime during 25.05 - Consolidating all Key Fragments into Keys, rounding up leftover fragments. Any Key fragment amount (greater than 0) will round up to 3 Fragments and you just need to forge them into a Key in your inventory. This is taking a little time to put together, as well as make sure it’s working properly, but aiming to do this sometime during 25.05.
• TBD (in-progress) - Delaying Sahn Uzal Mordekaiser Exalted skin while we make improvements.
• TBD (in-progress) - Increasing the quality of Battle Pass skins going forward.

The updated battle pass as we head into Act 2 should reflect everything that we highlighted above. Here’s a handy table with everything so you can visually see how it breaks down now for each level:

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*If left blank, indicates no change made

Since announcing these changes we've seen a handful of questions so we want to do a small roundup to make sure our answers to them get seen.

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"Will Chests be nerfed?"

• Hextech Chest content drop rates will be the same as they were last year and you shouldn’t see or expect any changes on that front.

"What does this mean for Champion Shards? Doesn’t this mean the value reduces?"

• The goal is to not nerf the disenchant value on those Shards. With 25.05 going live it should also include the fix that decouples the disenchant price for champion shards from the cost. Meaning shards should disenchant for the value you expect them to before the 50% reduction in cost we made across the board.
  TL;DR: in the FAQ, Shards disenchant for the same price, champions still cost less

"Regarding Rell and Alistar, will there be another way for players to grab their skin since they're gone from the Act 2 Pass now?"

• That's one of the many things on our list to figure out next. Frankly the Alistar skin in particular just wasn't very good. We're leaning towards just putting more time into another skin that Alistar has coming later this year instead of trying to improve this one given the starting point isn't that strong. As for Rell, we're going to be simply adding her skin to the shop at 975 RP.

On this Pro-focused patch, we're taking a heavy swing against lane swaps. For those unfamiliar, lane swaps are the fairly common practice for Pro teams to play out uneven 2v1 lanes instead of playing out conventional 1v1 top lane and 2v2 bot lane matchups. Not only does this unevenness make certain champions nearly unplayable if they can't withstand the lane swap itself, it deprives viewers of watching the more exciting heads-up matchups that conventional lanes provide, and not even Pro players are particularly excited to play these uneven lanes out.

Our prior design for reducing lane swaps (making top and mid outer tower take reduced damage in the early game) is insufficient as the amount of gold we're comfortable pushing into turret plates is not high enough to outweigh the potential benefits of skipping the early laning phase. As a result, we're implementing some very strong and targeted early game penalties for playing out nontraditional lane assignments. To be clear, these rules will not affect teams who don't play with any junglers at all, so for any 2/1/2 fans out there (under 1% of League games), feel free to keep duo laning top.

Once laning phase starts, we'll be detecting if two non-junglers are spending time together in the early laning phase. If so, they'll be met with strong income penalties that should outweigh just playing out their normal laning phase. Additionally, the defending champion will gain perfect gold and experience from anything nearby minions or towers kill. What's more, top laners on the receiving end will be nearly impossible to tower dive. Due to the short duration and diffuse nature, our hope is that these rules have limited effect on non-pro League gameplay.

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Lane Swap Detection

• From 1:30 to 3:30 if two enemy champions, both of whom don't have a jungle item, are in top/mid lane or surrounding areas.
• If the team has no junglers, the above rule is disabled.
• if the team has two or more junglers, junglers will now be included in the check.
• Champions who are about to trigger Lane Swap Detection will get a warning ping as well as a text warning that they're about to trigger lane swapping penalties.
• Champions who trigger Lane Swap Detection will have a debuff, an icon over their champion, and repeated text warning them that they're taking lane swap penalties.

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While Detected

• Defending turret has 95% damage reduction. Fortification no longer reduces damage if lane swaps are not detected.
• Defending turret deals 1000% damage to minions.
• Defending turret and minions give gold and XP from their kills to the nearest allied champion in the lane.
• Offending champions gain 50% less gold and XP from minions. This will linger for 20 seconds in the top lane, and 6 seconds for mid lane.
• In Top Lane only, the defending turret will also deal 1000% damage to champions and the defending champion has a 50% damage reduction under their turret.

We're making some adjustments with Atakhan's form spawn rules around tower dives to better catch deaths that happen between two of a team's towers in the same lane. We're also increasing the effect on score from the first few kills and tower dives which should result in the early game having more influence on seeing Ruinous or Voracious Atakahn.

For Paragon Chromas we wanted to make a change to them recently so that they weren't such a sparkly prismatic disco ball. We're not anti-disco ball, but the texture just had a bit too strong of an impact and we wanted to reduce that. We made this change with the Arcane Paragon Chromas, but as some of you noticed, that retroactively changed the Hall of Legends Paragon Chromas as well. Since these were skins that already existed and owned it didn't feel great to change them so heavily, especially if you acquired them already. So this patch we're somewhat reverting that change to get more of a middle ground between the two.

The Noxus map has been updated to make it a little less dreary, particularly in the lanes, bringing the tone a bit closer to the standard Summoner's Rift map. Looks like some foliage has made it onto the structures though, did our gardener take the day off?

Hello ARAMers, In this patch, we're making adjustments to Soraka and Sett.

For Soraka we want to emphasize her self-sustain and healing power rather than having her rely on Warmog's as her primary survival tool.

When it comes to Sett he's been performing well over the past two patches, so we're continuing to nerf his W and his self-regeneration to better balance his overall power. Thanks for tuning in, and enjoy the game!

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Buffs

Soraka

• Q Heal: 60/75/90/105/120 (+30% AP) ⇒ 75/90/105/120/135 (+40% AP)
• W Health Cost: 10% maximum health ⇒ 5% of maximum health
• Healing Done: 100% ⇒ 105%

Dark Harvest

• Damage Per Soul: 4 ⇒ 5

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Nerfs

Sett

• W Cooldown: 18/16.5/15/13.5/12 ⇒ 18/17/16/15/14
• Passive: Additional regen every 5% missing health ⇒ Additional regen every 10% missing health

Sudden Death

We’ve overall been really happy about the introduction of Sudden Death into Swiftplay, and it’s achieving its stated goals of ensuring that matches don’t drag out too long. Numbers wise we’re not seeing games often reach into this state, but when it does it can be a little confusing / frustrating when the game ends without a champion taking an action, so we’re going to make another tweak to it by stopping the structure burn down at the Nexus. This will put the game into an easily finishable state within the time we’re looking for in Swiftplay, while not having it end so abruptly that you’re not sure how or why it’s over.

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• Sudden Death: No longer damages the Nexus

Swiftplay Lobby Ready Check

We’re introducing a premade party Ready Check function for the Swiftplay lobby as it can be pretty jarring to be suddenly thrust into the queue by your eager friend who REALLY likes swiftplay, and now you’re playing Aftershock Teemo cause you didn’t get to change your runes. The host of the lobby will now have a “Find Match” button that is gated by other members of the lobby checking that they’re “ready” for the queue. Once you’ve then checked that you’re ready you’ll be unable to edit your selections and a nice little green checkmark will tell the lobby that you’re ready to go.

For players who are queueing up Swiftplay solo, the lobby experience should have no changes and function the exact same way you’re used to!

Items

Rod of Ages

Just a small consistency pass to align with other alternate modes' RoA scaling.

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• Timeless Timer: 45 seconds ⇒ 40 seconds

Welcome to The Grand Reckoning!

See the Dev article for Arena - The Grand Reckoning.

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Arena Fame

For this release of Arena, we're introducing the brand new Arena "Fame" system as the primary way to progress through your Arena experience. You'll generally gain Fame depending on how you place in any individual game, but in addition to just playing and winning there will also be a set of three missions you can accomplish per champion that will drastically accelerate your Fame leveling experience.

You can earn fame from the following methods:

• 10 Fame each round played (20% bonus if you play with friends)
• 50 Fame the first time you play a champion
• 150 Fame the first time you win with a champion (Finish in the Top 4)
• 200 Fame first time you finish in 1st place with a champion
• 30 Fame if you use the "Bravery" button. (Lock-in a random champion).
• 10 Fame if you play a "Crowd Favorite" champion

Fame Rewards:

• Level 1 - 100 Fame: Overflow (Silver Augment) added to the pool
• Level 2 - 1400 Fame: Hattrick (Gold Augment) added to the pool
• Level 3 - 2900 Fame: Matchup intro upgrade
• Level 4 - 4900 Fame: Slow and Steady (Gold Augment) added to pool
• Level 5 - 7400 Fame: 1 Reroll
• Level 6 - 10400 Fame: Matchup intro upgrade
• Level 7 - 14400 Fame: And My Axe (Gold Augment) added to pool
• Level 8 - 19400 Fame: Transmute: Chaos (Prismatic Augment) added to pool
• Level 9 - 28400 Fame: Matchup intro upgrade
• Beyond level 9 - Fame will increment infinitely, and will show off in your Arena lobbies to your friends

We're experimenting with other ways of progression for engaged Arena players, as we were seeing that a large portion of the Arena audience wasn't excited by Ranked, and in some cases were actively put off from the mode by the seriousness a rank provides. We're exploring the best version of Arena metasystems to support Arena feeling worth your time and fun to play.

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Bravery and Crowd Favorite

For those of you brave enough we've added a new way to play Arena. We're looking to reward players for branching out and trying champions in the Arena for the first time, while also hopefully encouraging some meta diversity, so in Champion Select you'll see two new options now.

• Bravery grants a bonus stat anvil and two bonus rerolls, and all you need to do is be brave enough to roll the dice for a random champion. Your champion will not be revealed to anyone until the loading screen.
• Crowd Favorite is an option for those of you looking to expand your champion pool but aren't feeling up to the challenge of going full bravery. During Champion Select you'll see 2-5 random champions (based on how many champions you own) with an anvil icon on the portrait. Selecting one of these will grant you a bonus stat anvil.

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Guest of Honor

Each game of Arena will feature a group of famous Noxians or Reckoners (aka champions), that will show up during different event rounds as "Guests of Honor." Every player in the lobby will then be able to vote on the Guests that have shown up and then the system will randomly roll a player and the guest they stand behind. The winning Guest will introduce a new rule that will be in place for the rest of the game.

This is a cameo replacement. The cameo system brought some much needed round to round variance to Arena but had some pretty substantial costs to game feel and fairness. While some cameos were quite popular like Sett and we do think there was a path forward with cameos, we're looking to find other systems that bring the same benefits but feel more fair and are more interesting and enjoyable to interact with. We tried a fairly wide range of Guests of Honor to see what kinds of guests were most fun to players, and what kinds of mechanics felt beyond acceptable. We'd like to see what things you all find most fun in this system as we work toward an ever better Arena.

We'll be releasing the Guest of Honor roster over 2 waves but here's the first wave you can expect to see!

• Darius: Each team takes 50 damage, whenever a team is eliminated the remaining team heals 5 HP
• Rell: Reduce the price of Prismatic Anvils by 1000 gold
• Vladimir: Everyone receives a bonus matching Augment
• Swain: Collect Ravens during combat. The number of Ravens you collect determines the tier of your future augment offerings.
• Kled:When your combat ends, gain a spell that can be cast to disrupt any ongoing combats
• Xin Zhao: When your team's health is reduced below 60 gain a Gold Stat Anvil. The first time you're at risk of elimination gain a Prismatic Stat Anvil.
• Briar: Round damage is increased by 5. Winning a round while at risk of elimination heals 15 Team Health
• Mordekaiser: During combat, a random player on each team enters the death realm
• Mel: Four additional Hexgates are enabled in each combat
• Talon: A combatant on each team deals 20% increased damage but grants 250 gold when slain
• Sion: The Ring of Fire spawns 15 seconds sooner and then rapidly constricts while slowly drifting around each arena
• Samira: Striking your opponent first empowers you with two juices, increased to 4 while hot streaking
• Elise: Revives are replaced with Elise wrapping players in cocoons that their ally must break
• Riven: Riven is unique and can appear in either voting phase. No rules change.
• Trundle: Legendary items are locked, and Legendary Anvils remain available

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Map Update

Maps are a core part of the Arena experience, and we've long thought that they need to be a bit more interesting than baseline terrain. We'd pushed pretty hard in a new direction with Koi Pond in a way that was clearly too frustrating for players. We do think maps have a lot of room in Arena to be a special part of the game experience and so we're continuing to explore new spaces while reining in some of the high end frustration that a new map experience might provide.

Koi Pond is seeing an update to add pathways from island to island so you can't be trapped by the lilypad, which should help a lot in the sharp cases where it felt like the map decided the game. We're confident this version of the map should still feel unique and interesting to fight on while not feeling as fight-ending for certain comps or plain frustrating to play on.

We're also adding a new map with a new interactable: pillars! These are pillars that you can attack to knock over and create walls to block pathways. If you hit an enemy with them they deal tons of damage. We're aiming to open up what maps can do when playing Arena and explore mechanics League doesn't see elsewhere, but we'll be watching this closely to make sure it's working in a fun way. Let us know how it feels!

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Arachnophobia

For Elise's Guest of Honor, we made two versions: one with clear spider iconography (and well… legit spiders in one too many dimensions) and one with all of that removed for folks who would prefer the amount of insect legs to remain at a minimum. This can be toggled via the "Hide Eye Candy" setting. We'd like a proper arachnophobia filter, but for now this is the best we can do.

For more specific details as to what happens on each side of the setting:

• If toggled on, no spiders will appear anywhere. Elise will not show herself when a player gets cocooned.
• If toggled off, a big Elise in her spider form will fall from the sky and cocoon any player when they die. Her vote cone area will also feature many little spiders skittering around on the ground.

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Arena QoL Changes:

• You can now (finally) progress Champion Mastery as part of your Arena experience
• 25 new augments: 20 new augments + 5 returning curse augments
• Tons of augment and item changes
• When you select a random stat anvil you'll now see a message displaying which stat you received
• Rerolls: Changed from bulk rerolls (1 reroll rerolls all 3 options) to individual rerolls (each slot has its own reroll)

Please let us know if you have any feedback about the mode or if you experience any bugs! See you in The Grand Reckoning!

Now Available

• Crystalis Motis Kha'Zix
• Hextech Ziggs
• Prestige Porcelain Lux
• Prestige Cyber Halo Janna
• Soulstealer Vayne
• Prestige Empyrean K'Sante
• Prestige Pulsefire Thresh
• Odyssey Kha'Zix (Merc)
• Dark Star Thresh (Antimatter)
• Soul Fighter Lux (Limitless)
• Cyber Halo Janna (Ace)
• Empyrean K'Sante (Neon Flare)
• PROJECT: Reckoning Icon
• High Noon 20219 Icon
• Spirit Blossom 2020 Icon
• PsyOps Icon
• Battle Queens Event Pass Icon
• Lavish Brutality
• Maniacal Contemplation
• 2021 Hextech Ward

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Leaving the Mythic Shop

• Prestige Mythmaker Cassiopeia
• Prestige Pulsefire Lucian
• Prestige PsyOps Ezreal
• Prestige K/DA Evelynn
• Prestige PROJECT: Zed
• Crystalis Motus Taliyah
• Hextech Annie
• Ashen Guardian Shen
• Hextech Poppy
• Coven Ashe (Dark Ritual)
• PsyOps Master Yi (Hunter)
• Sentinel Irelia (Resolute)
• Crystalis Motus Taliyah (Reclaimed)
• Soul Fighter Jhin (Limitless)
• Faerie Court Katarina (Winsome)
• PROJECT: Zed (Reckoning)
• Crystalis Motus Ward
• Dour Dude
• All For You
• PsyOps Icon
• 2020 K/DA ALL OUT Icon
• Lunar Beast Event Pass Icon
• 2021 PROJECT: Event Icon
• 2021 Coven Pass Icon
• Debonair Event Pass Icon
• Serpent Style! Emote

• Fixed a bug where Chemtech Dragon could not Spawn prior to Dragon Terrain's transition.
• Fixed an issue where Yasuo's Q2 and Q3 could fail to cast when the buff expires during his E dash shortly before or after the E debuff expires.
• Fixed an issue where Poppy's R would go on cooldown when casting while using her E while certain runes were equipped.
• Fixed an issue with Senna where last hitting a cannon with a support item wouldn't guarantee a soul drop.
• Fixed an issue where Mel's E debuff on enemy targets would sometimes cause the buff to display incorrectly.
• Fixed an issue where Viego's W damage while possessing Mel would be converted to magic damage.
• Fixed an issue with Streamer mode that sometimes caused Champion names to display in Chinese while in English mode.
• Fixed an issue that caused Streamer Mode to display internal names for champions.
• Fixed an issue where Guardian Angel's VFX would disappear after disconnecting and reconnecting.
• Fixed an issue where Deadman's Plate SFX failed to play for ranged champions.
• Fixed an issue that caused minions to fail to path towards respawned Nexus turrets.
• Fixed an issue where Lucian's Passive second shot would be inconsistent against different plant types.
• Fixed an issue where Mel's W would sometimes not reflect spells correctly if hit at certain angles.
• Fixed an issue where Viego would deal reduced damage after exiting Mel Possession.
• Fixed an issue where Mel's basic attack could disable Nidalee's W ability.
• Fixed an issue where Atakhan's False Life health bar icon didn't show up on champion clone health bars.
• Fixed an issue that caused redundant Bloodthirster buffs to appear while the shield was active.
• Fixed an issue where Briar's R channel was not canceled upon entering Atakhan's revive state.
• Fixed an issue where Axiom Arcanist wouldn't refund the base cooldown of an ultimate if it had multiple charges.
• Fixed an issue that caused Voracious Atakhan to sometimes use placeholder VFX when casting his drain ability.
• Fixed an issue that caused a drop in performance in custom game modes.
• Fixed an issue that caused Ambessa's Passive to ignore Blind/Dodge.
• Fixed an issue where enemies killed by Gangplank's barrel chain after buffering his Q out of range would grant no extra gold
• Fixed a tooltip issue with Thornmail in the shop and inventory.
• Fixed a tooltip issue with Chempunk Chainsword in the shop and inventory.
• Fixed an issue that caused Aurora's passive stacking to not be blocked by Shen's W when basic attacking.
• Fixed an issue where Warwick's first encounter voicelines didn't trigger against Soraka and Urgot.

The following skins will be released in this patch: