League of Legends’ second season is pivoting hard: out with the brutalist Noxian fortresses and war banners, in with a dreamy Ionian theater, and it came out with a mindblowing cinematic featuring the main theme of the season: the Spirit Blossom Festival. An older, but extremely well-received event that became part of the canon.
Below, we break down what’s changed, how it shifts your incentives, and whether Riot’s adjustments will actually hold up beyond aesthetic nostalgia.
Ionia’s Spirit Blossom Festival
The Rift’s environmental layer is shifting from militaristic reds to pastel twilight. Banners are gone, replaced with spectral flora. You get ethereal blues, mistlight purples, and architecture straight out of Ionian ancestor-worship rituals.
The map’s visual rework is backed by in-universe context: during the Spirit Blossom festival, Ionia’s spirit world opens. Dead relatives cross back into the world of the living, and the line between real and imagined collapses. This is the first time Riot has baked lore-world cosmology directly into the game space in a way that affects how the map feels to play on. Subtle, but structurally relevant, especially given the focus on cleansing and spiritual “refinement” in the patch’s other features.
Jungle and Objective Tweaks
- Atakhan now spawns only in Thornbound form. No more form RNG. It drops Bloody Roses (as before), but now includes Spirit Petals—a teamwide buff—and Spiritual Purification, a proximity slow triggered on kill participation. Think soft-zone control baked into jungle timing.
- Void Grubs get a delayed single-spawn. No more early contest spam.
- Rift Herald now spawns at 15:00.
This isn’t just patch polish. These shifts are part of a broader design trend: Riot is consolidating objectives into fewer windows with higher consequence. It’s less about spammed micro-contests, and more about discrete macro decisions with sharper rewards.
Queue Safety and Grief Mitigation
Two problem areas—queue friction and griefing—are getting systemic patches.
- Smite is auto-assigned for junglers and World Atlas for supports remove champ select derails due to user error or trolling. This works to completely remove the possibility of your jungler forgetting smite, as well.
- Bounty triggers now only activate when your team is actually behind, making rubber-banding less exploitable and more predictable.
- Griefing and int detection has been upgraded. Riot claims better precision on bans, based on adjusted machine learning thresholds. Whether that translates to fewer inters or just faster false positives remains to be seen.
Quality-of-life improvements are incremental, but pointed: they’re about removing failure states from the match before the 2-minute mark.
Spirit Blossom Skinline Expansion
The Spirit Blossom skinline gets a major expansion with high-end production values. Confirmed entries include:
- Morgana (Exalted)
- Ashe, Irelia (Legendary)
- Bard, Zyra, Lux, Varus, Ivern (Epic)
The entire Spirit Blossom skin philosophy revolves around alternate identities—champions reimagined as figures from Ionian myth: spirits, oni, guardians, or lost souls.
Also worth flagging: Pool Party Twitch is getting a standalone release alongside these. Tonal mismatch? Absolutely. This is part of the new strategy Riot’s taking into skins.
Last year, they released one or two skins that were one-off jokes, standalone releases without other skins accompanying them in the same skinline. This practice will be formalized and dubbed variety skins. They will be standalone additions to new or existing skinlines.
Note: Xin Zhao isn’t part of the Spirit Blossom wave, but he’s being featured in a separate comic drop. His skin catalog remains sizable for anyone still trying to make Xin work in 2025. Xin Zhao himself won’t be getting a Spirit Blossom skin, even though he’ll be getting a comic soon. The game still has a wide array of Xin Zhao skins to offer, though.
Season Rewards and Honor System Changes
Riot’s Honor system is getting a structural overhaul. It’s no longer about grind. It’s now a reactive index of your recent match behavior.
- New players start at Honor Level 3. This is the minimum Honor level to chat and use pings. If you’re coming in on a fresh account, or grabbing a second one to dodge ranked decay, make sure it’s clean enough to qualify. Buying an unranked LoL account that’s Honor-eligible can save you the early grind.
- Unlockable rewards (like Hextech chests, Battle Pass XP, voice/chat privileges) are now partially tied to Honor thresholds.
- Riot now shows direct feedback when a report leads to a ban, including the username of the punished player. Yes, it drops names now.
This is a cultural pivot: the Honor system is hopefully now a feedback loop, not just a ladder. Incentive structures are meant to reinforce short-term cooperation, not long-haul grind compliance. Plus, it’s going to be really satisfying to see exactly who got banned out of your report.
Vanguard Performance and Ranked LP Rollbacks
- Since Patch 25.06, Riot has banned 24,000+ accounts and refunded over 700,000 LP across 30,000 players.
- LP reimbursements are automatic. If your Ranked climb got sabotaged, you’ll get a direct match history notification and placement adjustment.
This ties into Riot’s broader push for post hoc fairness. The system doesn’t prevent cheaters in real time, but it retroactively adjusts your rank when it confirms sabotage. Not ideal, but it is a step in the right direction.
New Game Mode - Brawl
This summer introduces Brawl, a new game mode with no towers, no classic objectives, and no macro pacing. Instead:
- 5v5 format
- No lane structure, much like ARAM
- Two waves of minions push against eachother
- Nexus HP depletes as waves and champions are pushed into a portal in the Nexus
This is essentially Smite’s Arena mode, retrofitted into League’s ecosystem. Set in Bandle City, it’s clearly optimized for short-session queue times and high-agency, low-strategy deathballs. We do already have ARAM for that, though.
It will markedly feature Norra, a lore character that’s been teased on and off for a few years. Players may better recognize her as Yuumi’s lost master.
Summary
Season 2 is as much of a new theme as it is a new step towards better systems. Riot’s addressing and prioritizing four core friction points:
- Better mechanical curves for objectives
- Overarching plots in tandem with the season
- Grief/troll immunity
- Stagnating skin quality
If you’re a systems-oriented player, the jungle changes and Honor overhaul are worth your attention. If you’re here for skins, the Spirit Blossom expansions are some of the strongest in years. And if you’re just tired of the same macro game for the tenth season in a row, Brawl is there to breathe some fresh air into ARAM.
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