The second season of League of Legends in 2025 is coming out soon and big changes are accompanying the new Ionia Spirit Blossom theme.
LoL Patch 25.09 has been confirmed to release on Wednesday April 30, 2025, and with it we’ll say goodbye to Noxus and get lost in the new magical Ionian theming. As well as a pretty map, the game is getting some rather significant gameplay changes despite it being midway through the year. While esports coaches are likely cursing this, these updates should freshen up the game, especially with the new Atakhan.
Read on to learn about the biggest changes coming in the next LoL patch.
How does the new Atakhan work in LoL Season 2?
While the Noxian theme is leaving Summoner’s Rift, the Atakhan objective is here to stay and unspiringly the monster turned down the chance at a Spirit Blossom makeover. At least, visually.
The Season 2 update is bringing big changes to how Atakhan works as the objective now only has one form. The problematic Voracious form has thankfully been completely removed including its ridiculous instant revive power. Instead, he will only spawn with a new version of his Ruinous Form which is now known as Thornbound, linking nicely with his capture by Le Blanc in the recent cinematic.
Thornbound Atakhan will still spawn bloody roses, which reward bonus experience and damage for your team, near where champions die and around his pit. However, after defeating Thorbound Atakhan, he will reward the team with a new buff which collects all remaining petals on the map plus a few extra and then all petals are “purified” to have their effects increased by 25%. And if that wasn’t enough, for the remainder of the game whenever anyone on the team that slayed Atakhan gets a takedown, they will gain a petal and unleash an AoE ability that slows and deals damage.
Starting items and Summoner Spells for supports and junglers
In a surprising change, those who are given the jungle or support roles will have some creative options taken away from them.
To avoid certain trolls, only junglers will be allowed to have Smite (unless you’re playing Unsealed Spellbook) and the game will automatically select Smite for the chosen jungler. On top of that, support players will automatically start the game with the World Atlas support item bought for them. This limits some creative options like previous funnel strategies, which Riot have confirmed they will no longer allow to be possible.
And to avoid any unhappy people who get autofilled into these roles, you’re now able to swap roles with your teammates during champion select.
Objective pacing changes in LoL Season 2
A lot of players have complained about there being too many objectives in the game to the point where the landing phase barely existed.
To avoid this, Void Grubs will now only spawn once and won’t do so until eight minutes into the game instead of six. Their rewards have been re-tuned as you can only collect a maximum of three. On top of this, Rift Herald has also seen its spawn time brought forward a minute to the 15-minute marker and it has been made slightly easier to kill so that it requires less of a commitment from the entire team.
Collectively, this should give players more of a chance to lane against their opponents and try to get ahead before all the team fighting begins.
League of Legends bounty changes
One of the most frustrating systems in LoL has been the bounty system which has regularly felt unbalanced for players.
Riot is trying to address that in Season 2 and now claim that bounties will be suppressed and won’t come into effect unless a player is on a clearly winning team, which will be measured by gold, experience, and objectives. In effect, this should mean if your team is losing but you’re smashing your lane and are 5/0, you still shouldn’t have a bounty as your team would have to be ‘clearly’ ahead. This means it’s should be slightly easier to come back from behind rather than the one strong player on your team giving bonus gold to your already fed opponents.
On top of that, the bounty kill gold will now scale with levels instead of handing out a flat baseline of 300. Now, bounties will start at 250 and will scale up to 400.
In my seven years of esports writing, I’ve introuduced esports coverage to newspapers, interviewed some of the biggest names in the industry, and driven viewers mad with the puns in my YouTube scripts. I’m most proud of the latter.
