As
“For Demacia” prepares to bow out, fans are turning their attention to the highly anticipated second season of 2026. In the meantime,
Sheep Esports sat down with
League of Legends’ Lead Gameplay Designer,
Matthew “Phroxzon” Leung-Harrison, to discuss the lessons learned from the start of the year and how 2025 has shaped the content Riot is delivering today. In addition to this, the designer touches upon the Shyvana rework, the feedback it has received, and the ongoing efforts to bring the half-dragon more in line with higher levels of play following her update.
How do you feel about the 2026 season so far and its major gameplay changes?
Matthew “Phroxzon” Leung-Harrison: “I’d say we really tried to bring Summoner’s Rift back to its fundamentals in 2026. In 2025, we added a lot of things like Atakhan or Feats of Strength that felt more like pure additions to the game. For 2026, it was more about consolidating and strengthening what’s already there—making strategy more dynamic, and creating a better balance between team fighting and split pushing.
So far, we feel like these changes have given us a really strong foundation. It’s helped us balance roles better and give each one something that feels more fantasy-fulfilling—like toplaners being the highest level or botlaners having the most gold.
There are still things we want to improve, but overall we’re pretty happy with how the gameplay systems have landed and the direction the game is heading.
How have role quests landed in your eyes? Are roles now more balanced in terms of agency following their addition?
Phroxzon: That’s a really interesting question—especially the use of the word agency. I think it’s important to separate the agency of roles from their satisfaction.
For toplane, satisfaction has gone up quite a lot. Players get something unique: they can reach the highest level in the game and feel like a “raid boss.” They also get improvements like free Teleport, which feels very rewarding. Based on our surveys and player feedback, toplaners have been very satisfied this season.
At the same time, our goal was to balance roles in terms of power. What we think worked well for toplane is that we added satisfying elements without making the role overpowered, at least according to our metrics. There are strengths and weaknesses to playing top.
A big factor here is our effort to reduce early snowballing. We lowered the rewards for repeatedly killing the same opponent, so dominating your lane early—like getting multiple solo kills—is less impactful than before. That trade-off let us add powerful-feeling features, like free Teleport, while keeping the overall balance between satisfaction and power in a good spot.
There’s still a push and pull. For example, botlane can sometimes get out of control, and toplaners may not have the economy to deal with that.
Are role quests essential for the future of League, and could the game work without them? Have they made balancing easier?
Phroxzon: Yeah, I think so. We’ve gone back and forth on this—how much we want to enforce roles and role identity versus how much freedom we give players to experiment, like running more than two sololaners, no jungler, or other creative setups.
That kind of flexibility can be fun, but it’s also confusing, especially for newer players. Roles help give structure—like in soccer, where being a defender or a midfielder gives you a clear identity, responsibility, and expectations within a team.
Over time, we’ve leaned more toward reinforcing role identity because it resonates with players and makes the game easier to balance. If we have a clearer idea of what team compositions look like, it’s much easier to tune the game. It also helps for esports.
“Right now, we don’t see a strong reason to move away from role quests.”
That said, we still try to leave room for flexibility. For example, botlane quests don’t force you into a specific champion type—they give you extra gold rather than raw stats, so you can still play things like Yasuo or Cassiopeia bot if you want.
The goal is really to strike a balance: give players a clear role identity without completely locking them into it and dictating which champions can be played.
How important is it to make League more accessible to new and returning players? Does it shape some of the design team’s work, especially when thinking of what kind of changes you can make to the game?
Phroxzon: 100%. We always need new players coming into the ecosystem, and also players returning after taking a break. League is very cyclical—people step away for a while because of life, then come back and might feel lost.
That’s why lowering the barrier to entry is really important, especially when other games in similar genres use different control schemes. For example, if you come from a game like VALORANT, switching to mouse-only movement in League can feel like a big jump. Features like WASD are meant to make that transition easier and make the game feel more approachable.
At the same time, we have to be careful not to hurt the experience for existing players. It would be bad if something like WASD became the optimal way to play. So we’re very deliberate with tuning—we have levers for melee vs ranged champions, and for different control schemes, to make sure everything stays balanced.
A lot of these features are about creating accessible pathways into the game while keeping the core experience intact. We also know we can improve how we teach the game’s fundamentals, and things like Last Hit Assistance or WASD help with that.
There are also practical considerations—in some regions, players don’t even use a mouse and play on a trackpad, where something like WASD can actually be much easier. So overall, it’s about making the game more accessible without displacing long-time players.
How do you balance making enough changes without making the game feel stale? told us last week that he felt the game was too stale for higher levels of play.
Phroxzon: There’s always a sweet spot.
One thing we think about a lot is whether there are strong picks in the meta that just haven’t been discovered yet, and whether we should step in to push those forward. I definitely empathize with pro players here—there’s only so much time to practice, and trying to innovate is costly. You might spend a lot of time preparing a new pick, and then it gets banned or you only play it once.
At the same time, there’s real value in having a stable game. If things aren’t constantly changing, teams can spend more time exploring and discovering new strategies instead of just adapting to patches.
“We do think there are a lot of underutilized champions that are actually stronger than people assume.”
We look at data, one-trick players, and things like that, and often find picks that just don’t see play. A good example is when G2 brought out their Kog’Maw Lulu botlane—Gen.G didn’t really have an answer, even though that combo had been playable the whole time. It raises the question of how many strategies like that exist, and whether they’d ever show up if we were constantly shaking up the meta.
So it’s really a push and pull between disrupting the game and keeping it stable enough for innovation. Overall, we think the game is in a pretty balanced spot right now.
Are you planning to make fewer changes in Seasons 2 and 3 due to what happened in 2025 then?
Phroxzon: Yeah, last year’s changes were pretty disruptive, both in terms of the number of additions—like Feats of Strength and Atakhan—and just the overall volume of changes across the seasons.
“The amount of changes we made in 2025 felt like too much for players.”
So for Season 2, we’re taking a more conservative approach. We’re aiming for fewer changes overall, but making them more impactful.
That includes smaller system changes that can have ripple effects, like adding back keystones such as Deathfire Touch or Stormraider's Surge. Those kinds of additions can make the game feel fresh without overwhelming players with too much new content.
We’re really trying to find the right pace of change—something that encourages innovation and keeps the game from feeling stale, but doesn’t become too disruptive.
From what I’ve gathered, seasons are planned quite far in advance. Does that limit your ability to adapt to player feedback?
Phroxzon: It really depends. For something like the 2025 season, we had to lock in Atakhan very early—around March 2024. That’s because it wasn’t just a gameplay feature; it became part of the seasonal narrative and creative direction as well.
We didn’t start with “let’s make Atakhan.” It began as a gameplay idea—adding a new epic objective—and then we worked with the narrative and creative teams to figure out what it would become. Even the season theme, like Noxus, wasn’t fully decided at that point. So these things take a long time to develop.
Because of that, once everything is committed, it’s very hard to pivot. You can’t really decide later to remove a major character like that—it just wouldn’t work.
There are pros and cons to this. On one hand, it allows us to create big, memorable moments—things players will look back on and remember. On the other hand, it does reduce flexibility if players don’t end up liking it.
Would Atakhan have been removed earlier if it weren’t tied to the season’s theme?
Phroxzon: Interesting question…
“I could have seen us removing Atakhan earlier, if not for thematics constraints, yes”.
That said, I think we did end up in a pretty reasonable spot by the end. It was just a different shape of League of Legends—very high “mind share”. There was a lot of moving around the map to take objectives: Dragon, Void Grubs, Dragon again, Rift Herald, Atakhan, Baron.
It became a very objective-focused style of gameplay, which I think is good for one season, maybe even a year. But I do think it can get tiring over multiple years. So yeah, I think it ran its course for a reasonable amount of time.
Is the lack of a Demacia tie-in in this year’s changes an intentional decision to avoid similar issues?
Phroxzon: Yeah, I would say it was a very explicit decision to decouple them. It gives us a lot more flexibility.
When gameplay and narrative are too tightly linked, it can end up constraining both sides. We saw that with Atakhan and Feats of Strength, where we were sometimes making compromises on Summoner’s Rift gameplay just to deliver a narratively cohesive moment.
We ultimately decided that was too limiting, and in some cases it could degrade the gameplay experience if we stayed in that model. So the approach now is:
“We prioritise what’s right for Summoner’s Rift first.”
If that aligns with narrative, that’s great—but it’s not a requirement anymore.
Instead, narrative elements can live more comfortably in other spaces, like modes or smaller events. That gives us more freedom to surprise players without having to constantly reshape core gameplay around a theme.
When were the 2026 gameplay changes locked in?
Phroxzon: I’d say it was a bit later. We locked in the 2026 season start package around July or August, so a few months later than when we locked changes for the 2025 season.
At the same time, we were also working on a pretty significant set of ranked changes. We knew those were going to take up a big part of the season’s impact as well.
So that definitely influenced our decisions on how much we changed core Summoner’s Rift gameplay. Since the ranked updates—like Aegis of Valor and other systems—were going to feel pretty impactful, we adjusted the scope of the gameplay changes accordingly.
Has the work towards “League Next” affected your content cadence?
Phroxzon: I wouldn’t say majorly. These things are planned pretty far in advance, and we’re still going to deliver a pretty sizeable package for Season 1 regardless. So no, I wouldn’t say it’s had a big impact on our work in that sense.
Has the live game balance team reduced in size due to this major project?
Phroxzon: There’s definitely some people moving around. I wouldn’t say we’re losing any overall expertise or throughput, though.
For example,
Phreak (David Turley) recently moved off the live team onto other projects, and I’m stepping back in as well. I’ve always enjoyed working directly on the live game, and I was still involved in that capacity.
“So the plan is really to continue staffing the live team in the way it needs to support the game for 2026.”
Do you feel the Shyvana rework landing has met expectations, and how are you responding to feedback about its gameplay direction?
Phroxzon: With reworks—especially big VGU-type reworks—it’s always challenging to strike the right balance between making something feel new and still keeping it familiar or resonant with what players liked about the original champion.
Over the years, we’ve gone back and forth on this: how much a VGU should completely change a champion’s gameplay—like Poppy, Galio, or Mordekaiser—or how much it should respect the original intent.
For Shyvana specifically, she had a pretty large player base that really liked how she played. So we felt the best approach was to modernise her and improve what was already there, rather than completely reinvent her.
That does have pros and cons. On one hand, you get something that feels like a clear improvement to existing Shyvana players. On the other, there will always be people who wanted a more drastic change and feel a bit underwhelmed.
But if we had gone the other way and changed her completely, I think we would’ve also had a lot of players saying, “I liked old Shyvana, and you took that away from me.”
Kind of what happened with Skarner, right?
Phroxzon: Exactly. There’s no real way to please everyone. For Shyvana specifically, she had a really large audience that resonated with her old gameplay, and we also thought her kit was actually in a pretty reasonable spot. The goal was more to modernise and refine what was already there.
I do agree with the feedback about making her more viable in toplane. The issue is that her passive isn’t really set up to support a laning pattern in the same way other stacking champions are—like Smolder, Aurelion Sol, Veigar, or Nasus. They have very satisfying stacking loops, and Shyvana doesn’t quite match that for toplane.
So right now, given how much weaker Shyvana top is compared to jungle, it’s going to be difficult to properly land her as a toplane champion without a more significant change list.
We could revisit that in the future, but we wouldn’t want to do a “half measure” where we just force her into viability without it feeling good. If we were going to support toplane properly, it would need a more substantial and intentional design shift.
What we are focusing on right now is improving clarity between her AD and AP builds. At the moment she often builds Kraken Slayer, which doesn’t really fit the fantasy of a big, durable dragon, so that’s something we want to address.
“The other focus is her poor performance at higher levels of play.”
Those are the two main areas we’re currently targeting with upcoming changes we’ve been working on for a while. Those should come out in an upcoming patch—maybe 26.9 or 26.10—but it’s still in progress.
Shyvana has consistently ranked very high in rework votes, and it was also mentioned that a significant portion of her playerbase is Chinese. Did Shyvana’s strong popularity in China influence her rework direction?
Phroxzon: We try to take feedback from all audiences. That said, China is of course a very major part of the player base, and you’re right—Chinese players really enjoy Shyvana.
More broadly, there’s a tendency there to like champions with a simpler presentation and straightforward gameplay patterns, like Jarvan IV or Shyvana. Champions where you can just fight often, run in, and act very directly. Because of that, Shyvana has always had an outsized level of popularity in that region.
“That definitely does play some role in our decision-making, but it’s not the only factor”
We always have to balance it against feedback from other regions as well. Overall though, in Shyvana’s case, it for sure was one of the reasons that reinforced the idea of keeping a simpler, familiar gameplay identity was important for her rework.
Are Riot already working on other reworks, and does Shyvana’s reception affect how future reworks are handled?
Phroxzon: Of course I can’t really say what specific champions or reworks we’re working on.
But I will say we’re constantly going back and forth on how we should approach reworks in general—especially across different scopes. You’ve got medium-scope reworks like what we did with Taliyah in the past, where we adjusted things like her Q and the way worked ground interacts, and then you’ve got full VGUs. A big part of it is understanding how each rework is going to land with that champion’s specific audience.
“There really isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach where we always completely change a champion or always preserve them.”
It really depends on who the audience is and what they’re resonating with. Shyvana is a good example of that—what we learned there is more about being clear on what we’re trying to achieve with a rework and making sure the changes actually support that goal.
So yeah, there are lots of different ways to approach it, and it’s not like there’s a single perfect answer that applies every time.
A more fun question to close off: Is there a champion you personally want to rework that others at Riot wouldn’t necessarily agree with?
Phroxzon: That’s interesting. From my personal taste as a player, I don’t enjoy playing against perma split-pushing champions. So the ones that come to mind for me are things like Yorick or Tryndamere.
Tryndamere is slated for a rework at some point anyways, right?
Phroxzon: Yeah, but the thing is that from a design perspective we also think Tryndamere’s ultimate is extremely valuable for the game. So when people say they want him reworked, a lot of the time they’ll say, “remove his ultimate” or “change his ultimate,” and we’re like—that’s kind of the cool thing about it.
The idea of having someone who just can’t die is a really compelling fantasy. So yeah, I do think probably champions like Yorick or Tryndamere are the ones that come to mind for me.”
