League of Legends Talks About Major Gameplay Changes Coming in 2026 Season 2 Act 1: Pandemonium

The highly anticipated Dev Update talking about the second Season of the year has launched, giving players a chance to learn about what they can expect. This has shown all sorts of gameplay elements that players can expect, including gameplay updates, themes, skins, and more.

With every new Season, League of Legends shakes up the overall gameplay to keep it interesting, innovating, refining, and switching the gameplay that worked and didn't throughout the first. This gives the individual elements enough time to shine and for players to get a chance to get used to the systems, all the while, Riot Games gathers data on what's working and isn't.

The major changes coming to Pandemonium will be focused on the role quests, specifically, top lane and mid lane. Since role quests were meant to get players bound to their individual lanes to ensure that players are sticking to their roles properly.

While this has worked for a grand majority of characters and roles, mid lane champions that require roaming consistently were struggling to keep up with role quest experience. Likewise, Singed tends to be a nuisance and run around the world, and his gameplay was being affected negatively by his role quest progression.

Now, this doesn't mean that the role quests are being updated to reward these systems, but the progression has been adjusted to make it more forgiving for the players who won't be around their lanes for a long time. This should prevent specific types of champions from falling behind on the core role quest gameplay without having to sacrifice their core gameplay loop.

The rewards for these two roles have also been modified to favour every champion within the roster that wants to play in those lanes rather than a select few. For top lane, the experience for teamfighting has been increased as well, giving non-split pushers the chance to better benefit from the extra experience gained throughout the gameplay.

Mid lane, instead, will have its rewards entirely shifted. Instead of the empowered recall, after players complete the mid-lane quest, they'll get 6% bonus AD and AP, which will scale stronger into the late game, and emphasise the player's fantasy of power that's present in the lane.

So, in summary, players can expect the following changes to role quests:

• Adjusted role quest progression to make roaming champions more accessible without falling behind too much.
• Increased top lane's reward for experience gains during teamfights, to better reward top lane champions who don't favour split pushing.
• Replaced the empowered recall reward for mid lane with a 6% increase in AP and AD, which will make scaling stronger.

Regarding elements that won't be centred around role quests, the other aim for Pandemonium will be to increase build diversity. For this section, there aren't too many specifics, but a vast amount of content is going to be affected by the search for upgraded gameplay elements.

Instead, we'll give a bit of an overview about everything that we learned from the dev update and talk about the changes, rather than trying to go into specifics that don't exist yet. Or at least, they don't exist in an official format, as though Pandemonium is available to play on the PBE, those changes aren't final.

Here are the things we're expecting to get affected

• Better support for alternative playstyles, like AP Ezreal or Attack Speed Xin Zhao.
• Two new runes, Deathfire Touch and Stormraider's Stormsurge.
• Phase Rush is being removed (favouring Stomraider's Stormsurge).
• A variety of item adjustments, including to Dusk and Dawn.
• Two new starting items.
• New Omnivamp boots.
• Trailblazer and Opportunity are both being removed.

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Those are all of the gameplay changes coming during 2026 Season 2 Act 1: Pandemonium. All of the changes are available on the PBE at the moment, but bear in mind that those are tentative and are liable to change throughout the testing period.