The
League of Legends 26.02 Patch Notes are here. Following the
official schedule, Patch 26.02 is expected to drop on
Thursday, January 22, 2026. This is the first real update of the new season, bringing lots of adjustments from Riot Games for the first 2026 games to be more balanced.
Patch 16.2 introduces a focused round of balance updates targeting the jungle ecosystem and broader strategic flow of matches. Champions like Aatrox, Ashe, Draven, Master Yi, Taliyah, Varus, and Viego receive performance boosts—particularly among AD junglers who struggled in recent metas—while new items such as Fiendhunter Bolts and Hexoptics 44 are also strengthened.
On the other hand, overperforming picks like Gwen, Jayce, Lilia, Malphite, Nunu & Willump, Sivir, Smolder, and Zed see nerfs, alongside a reduction to Bandlepipes' impact. The goal is to even out jungle strength between different types of champions and keep the role healthy without big reworks.
The Full Patch 26.02 Preview. Credit: @RiotPhreak on X.
Buffs:
Champion: Aatrox, Ashe, Draven, Master Yi, Taliyah, Varus, Viego
System: Fiendhunter Bolts (item), Hexoptics 44 (item)
Nerfs:
Champion: Gwen, Jayce, Lilia, Malphite, Nunu & Willump, Sivir, Smolder, Zed
System: Bandlepipes
Read more about
League of Legends changes on the X account of
Matt "Phroxzon" Leung-Harrison.
Jungle
- Some of the main changes this patch are re-distributing some of the jungle power
- This includes buffs to some of the AD junglers like Aatrox, Master Yi, Viego, Trynd (micropatched last patch) and nerfs to some of the outliers like Zed, Jayce who has been strong for a while
- Several of the AP or Tank junglers have really benefitted from being able to kill Epic monsters from increased pet damage, where they otherwise previously lacked DPS to do so and so they're being tapped down a bit as well
- We expect that this shift within the Jungle role itself is going to have ripple effects into Pro Play, but are waiting to see the outcomes of this before taking larger swings and having Junglers hold more dominion over Epic monsters is an intended directional adjustment
Game Strategy
- One of our major goals with this season was bring into better balance the 3 major strategic decisions
- Sieging, Grouping for Objectives & Split Pushing are all intended to play a part
- In 2025 in particular, Grouping for Objectives was by far the dominant strategy, so the adjustments to tower plates, homeguards, minion spawn rate and nerfs to objective power were intended to change some of this balance
- In particular, it was hard to justify hitting towers sometimes without rewards for doing so and in some situations, champions were ready to hit towers, but there just weren't minions in the right place at the right time to facilitate that especially in the sidelanes
- We're curious to see how strategy for this evolves over the course of the Season
Game Time & Snowballing
- For the most part, our metrics around snowballing have come in and they're not looking any higher than last season (and for average play are lower).
- This is pretty much the same across every region. Game time is also looking slightly longer in each region, and even moreso given that the game starts earlier.
- Certainly, downtime with more frequent minion spawns and homeguards makes it feel like there's constant action happening
- Hitting towers and getting those chunks of damage from crystalline overgrowth both feels more rewarding (and more confronting on the receiving end), so it feels like progress is being made faster, even if it's not actually that much faster.
- Barons are being taken earlier, since they're spawning again at 20 minutes, even though Baron takes are a bit weaker than they were before (gives +150G instead of +300G), so games don't typically end after the first Baron push. Players have often associated the first Baron take with the game being over, but that is a bit less of the case this Season.
Vision
- The amount of vision has also been a hot topic. We've heard a lot of your discussions on Faelights and the overall state of vision. We've opted not to do anything to do them for 16.2, but are in active discussion for 16.3, especially in terms of how they affect early jungle ganks. Otherwise, we're not planning anything major until Pro Play starts
Role Agency & Strategy
- We're going to hold a little bit on taking a definitive stance on which roles are most and least powerful, we don't feel any are so out of line that we need to act now. It's been fun to observe how some players are putting roles at the top of their tier list and different players are putting the same role at the bottom (cough ADC cough).
- There are a lot of things for players to optimize here, but so far, we've been pretty happy with how the game, especially in the mid-game feels a bit more strategic; should I greed tempo to get an Overgrowth proc here, should I push next wave to try and get that turret chunk for gold.
