Riot Games Talks Skins in Latest Dev Update: Prestige, Exalted, Machine Herald Viktor, and Battle Pass Update

The latest Dev Update for League of Legends came out recently, where Riot Games spoke a bit about a lot of stuff coming up in the upcoming patches for the newest season. One of the topics mentioned was skins, which had a lot of different topics to keep in mind.

First up, we know about the new champions who will be getting Prestige skins for the upcoming season. Sylas and Mel will be receiving Prestige skins on the Mythic Shop and Jarvan IV and Zoe will be receiving Prestige skins on the Battle Pass.

These will be for the first and second act of the upcoming Season (the final Season of 2025). The first act will feature Sylas and Jarvan IV, whereas the second act will feature Mel and Zoe.

After the announcement of the Prestige skins, we got some news regarding the upcoming Exalted skin for Viego (the controversial gacha skins). The skin (unannounced theme) will be getting delayed from when it was originally meant to release until next year, with an undisclosed launch time.

We know from posts made by Riot Meddler on reddit that it might be sometime early 2026, but there isn't anything to confirm when it will be. For the time being, we know that it has been delayed, and there is no skin filling the empty gacha slot from here to there (so whether we'll have reruns, an extended Spirit Blossom Morgana banner, or nothing is yet to be announced).

Finally on the skin section, we learned the official launch date for Machine Herald Viktor, the skin that Riot Games is releasing in response to the Viktor rework from Arcane by the Viktor mains. Since this moved the champion significantly from his machine roots, where his original theme was that robotics would prevail and flesh was weakness, a lot of mains who loved him for his lore were — to put it lightly — highly disappointed.

The skin for Machine Herald Viktor will launch in Patch 25.19 on the 24th of September 2025, and it will be given for free to all Viktor players who had Mastery 5 or above on the 4th of August. This was intentionally left unannounced, so that players wouldn't be farming Viktor masteries in hopes of getting the skin for free — everyone who didn't have the mastery at the time will have to purchase it.

The last note regarding skins was the Battle Pass, where Riot Games announced that it has been "harder to complete than intended". In light of this, the Battle Pass is being reduced from 50 total rewards to 48, but fret not, as the amount of rewards isn't being reduced — instead, some items (likely blue essence, orange essence, and the like) will be squashed into one reward.

Whether this will affect the numbers in the future is yet to be seen, as we don't have the specifics for the Battle Pass at the moment.