LoL Season 14 Dev Blog Reveals New Champions, VGU’s, Skins and More!

With the new split of League of Legends right around the corner, the LoL Season 14 Dev Blog reveals everything you need to know about S14!

In just a few days, League of Legends’ 13^th Season will officially end, with Season 14 beginning on January 9 – which is next Tuesday. While we already know that Mythic items will be removed, a ton of new items will be added, and Summoner’s Rift will change a ton, there’s still loads of information we don’t have about Riot’s plans for this year.

Thankfully, the developers, designers and team leads banded together to give us insight into the additions to our favourite MOBA in Season 14 – buckle up, it’s gonna be a long ride!

Lol Season 14 Dev Blog Reveals

LoL Season 14 Ranked Changes

Riot Games revealed that they would implement a new system in Season 14 in place of the old ELO MMR called TrueSkill 2. While they won’t implement that system at the start, they will make improvements to the ranking system. It will be harder to fall into a negative LP gain (where you lose 25 LP on a loss but gain only 20 on a win), as well as monitoring smurfs better, differentiating them from new players easier.

With the changes Riot Games made to the Ranked system last year, LoL’s ladder should become a much healthier place to climb on in 2024!

LoL Season 14 Champions

The first update Riot Lexical and Riot Sopebox gave us was on Skarner’s rework. While the champion team showed us some parts of his new gameplay, now they shared bits of his new lore as a founder of Ixtal, the region where Qiyana, Rengar and Milio originate from. They also revealed that the new Skarner will hit the Rift in the first half of 2024!

An Arcane-tied update will be the first new VGU of 2024, which will be for one of the main (or at least, very important) members of the show’s cast. The design team wants to bring them up to the standards of the show and the game’ current state – which suggests an older champion that hasn’t received an update since their addition to the game. That could only be Vi, as Caitlyn got a visual update not long ago, while Jinx has been a staple in both the professional and casual meta. Even though Vi has been popular among pros for 2 seasons now, she would deserve some love, at least to her voice lines and animations. This update should be added to the game after the first Ranked Split.

The other update is for Shyvana – seems like Riot Games are focusing on dragons this year even after Smolder! She won’t receive a full overhaul like Skarner, as she will keep her lore and general feel, but she will be updated. Sadly, this VGU will only arrive next year in 2025, after Season 2 of Arcane concludes. So far, they only showed some sketches, but the Half-Dragon looks very promising!

After Smolder, a new Vastayan character will arrive for the toplane in the form of a midrange mage. The developers said that this champion has been in the works for a long time thematically, but last time they tried to bring them to life, Sylas was born instead – we can expect something along the likeness of the Unshackled.

They also revealed that a new champion will be added from the hit show Arcane, which just got it’s first teaser for Season 2. The mother of Mel Medarda, Ambessa Medarda will be one of the new champions of Season 14. According to the developers, she should be a hard hitting but agile fighter – which suggest that she will be a jungler rather than a support or a toplaner.

LoL Season 14 Arcane Tie-ins

Alongside Ambessa and the new VGU, Riot will add Arcane-inspired game modes and gameplay updates to hype the next season of the show up. Hopefully the new mode will be something like Butcher’s Bridge ARAM was a few years ago.

LoL Season 14 Mastery

Masteries will be unlocked next year! Mastery Level 7 will be increased to Mastery Level 10 with new emotes, with numbers added to the 10^th level’s emblem as you go higher and higher – to infinity! If you achieved the threshold with your favourite champions already, these tiers will be upgraded automatically for you.

TPS MOBA SMITE has a system similar to this, where you can go up to 10 ranks by playing games on each god, and if you get to the next checkpoint, a star will be added to your god’s card in the lobby. There are some players who have so many stars they create a homogenous golden line – hopefully, you can do something similar in League as well!

LoL Season 14 Game Modes

Riot Cadmus and Riot ChooChooTrainnnn talked about the modes of the next Season. Arena will return in the first half of the year again, in an even more improved version than before! Similarly to Teamfight Tactics, Arena will have 8 participants – teams of 2 – the next time it rolls around. The mode will also receive some new maps with new twists, as well as new Augments.

The other returning modes next year will be One For All, when each team plays the same champion, as well as fan-favourite URF. After these modes, they will bring back more RGM’s, but we don’t know what those are yet.

LoL Season 14 Anti Cheat

If you played Riot’s tactical FPS, VALORANT, you might be familiar with it’s anti cheat, Vanguard. The software caused a bit of an outrage after the company revealed that it can access each computer’s kernel, which is much more intrusive than other means of protection. However, it proved to be very effective, as cheating is virtually impossible with hacks in VALORANT.

League had a security breach earlier this year, which meant that Riot had improve their defences – so Riot Vanguard will be required to play LoL from the next Season.

LoL Season 14 Skins

The leads of the skins team revealed that Rakan, Ezreal, Kindred, Evelynn and Kayn will be the ones to get a Prestige skin in the next Season – in that order, meaning that Rakan players will be happy first! And that’s only for Split 1 of 2024, so other 5 champs will get a flashy new outfit in the second half of the year.

Two ASU’s are also coming next year! Lee Sin is almost ready, even though he has a plethora of skin, arriving in early May. The other announced visual update was Teemo, who will be arriving a bit later than anticipated due to some complications.

The first new skinline will be for Lunar New Year called Heavenscale with some incredible concept arts for Ezreal and Kai’sa, combining heavenly motifs with Asian – especially Southeast Asian – cultural aspects. Primal Ambush will be the other next skinline of next year, with Vi and Sivir headlining the concepts arts.

The returning skinlines will be Porcelain, Faerie Court, PROJECT and Blood Moon among others, all of them receiving some new skins before Summer 2024.

The skin team is also working on a new Rammus skin to get him out of the group of champs who didn’t get one for more than 1000 days!

LoL Season 14 Esports

As you know, the next season of professional League of Legends kicks off on January 13^th with the LEC, followed by all the major leagues in the coming weeks. There will be some big changes for the EMEA League, as it will have shorter splits thanks to the Regular Season and Groups being merged, while the North American LCS will be moved back to the weekends.

The first international competition, the Mid-Season Invitational will undergo some further changes. Even though last year’s improvements were great, the MSI will hold even more weight. The 4 biggest regions (the LEC, the LCS, the LPL and the LCK) will have their Worlds slots set to 3, but can earn more spots through the MSI. The winner of the event will automatically qualify for Worlds, while the next best performing region (so either the runner-up, or with another Chinese final, the 3^rd place team) will earn an extra spot for their region.

The 2024 Mid-Season Invitational will take place from May 1^st to May 19^th in Chengdu, China, which will be the first time the city will held an esports event this big. Worlds will be held in Europe, with the finals taking place in London’s O2 Arena, the Play-Ins and Swiss Stages in the new LEC Studio in Berlin, while the Quarterfinals and Semi-Finals will be held in the Adidas Arena in France. The 2024 League of Legends World Championship will march on from September 24^th to November 2^nd, which leaves teams with more time off before the start of the 2025 Season.

League of Legends’ next year looks incredible, and as it’s the 15^th birthday of the game, the developers promised that we would see even more cool stuff added to our favourite game. Stay tuned to ESTNN for the latest updates to LoL!