League Of Legends

How season ten is changing the Summoner’s Rift.

- Steven Messner

Riot’s MOBA may have just turned ten years old, but its new Rise of the Elements update sure makes it feel new and exciting. And by ‘exciting’ I mean chaotic as all hell. First revealed during the League of Legends tenth anniversary celebration—where the developer also announced seven new games including an FPS and a card game—Rise of the Elements is one of the biggest shake ups to LoL’s Summoner’s Rift in years, giving players even more opportunities for big plays and epic ganks.

Setting the stage for League of Legends’ tenth competitive season, Rise of the Elements makes Summoner’s Rift feel more dynamic and reactive both during the course of a match and across multiple games. It focuses almost entirely on the Elemental Drakes, a kind of secondary objective that periodically spawn in the lower middle of Summoner’s Rift. Where Elemental Drakes used to just give minor buffs to the team that killed them—with the buffs increasing in power after killing successive Drakes—now each one can also unleash cataclysmic elemental storms that change the layout of Summoner’s Rift over the course of each game.