League of Legends Dev Update: Hextech Chests, Battle Pass Skins, Arena Updates, and More

League of Legends

Martin Arévalo-Östberg

League of Legends has seen some drastic changes land in the game with the start of the 2025 Season. For that reason, Riot Games have taken to their latest Dev Update to disclose their reasoning behind some of the changes and shed some light on what else we can expect to come to the game in the near future.

Let's go ahead and take a look at some of the biggest takeaways from the latest League of Legends Dev Update.

Goodbye Hextech Chests

First introduced all the way back in 2016, Hextech Chests have long been a great way to get free skins in League of Legends. Even if you had no real power over the skin shard that would be inside a chest when you opened it, these were easy enough to collect so that a skin you were interested in would always come along eventually.

Ever since the 2025 season came around earning chests from playing games is no longer an option in the game. Now, Riot Games has confirmed that Hextech Chests will not be coming back to League of Legends, speaking of the chests as a seemingly good idea initially, but one that proved to be unsustainable, as these chests led to Riot giving away too many free skins in the end.

"As a free-to-play game, skins are the primary way League pays its bills. They're what give us the ability to continue to develop the game and wider ecosystem, from adding new game modes, to updates to Summoner's Rift, cinematics, live events like Worlds, patch to patch balance and much longer term investments in League for the future."

- Riot Pabro, Executive Producer of League of Legends

Hextech Chests used to be a great way to work for, rather than pay for, skins in League of Legends. (Credit: Riot Games)

Changes to Battle Passes

There has been a lot of criticism surrounding the latest Battle Pass skins, namely for Masque of the Black Rose Katarina and Masque of the Black Rose Elise. Riot has heard these complaints, and are ready to act on them.

Starting with the Season 2 Battle Pass skins, which will come about in May of this year, improvements will be made to skins earned through Battle Passes, specifically when it comes to adding more distinct visual effects and more pronounced model changes.

As far as Battle Pass missions go, changes will be made to unpopular missions which require a player to play with a specific skin equipped, or simply quests that were deemed unnecessarily hard to complete.

Teamfight Tactics (TFT) players will also be happy to know that the experience gained for League of Legends Battle Passes by playing TFT will be doubled moving forward.

Stage of the Game

League of Legends has undergone some of its biggest changes ever with the start of the new 2025 Season. From Feats of Strength, to a new Summoner's Rif and new Epic Objectives, there are several ways in which the game can feel entirely different than last year.

For this reason, Riot has been keeping a close look at how these changes have been affecting the game, and are ready to make changes if deemed necessary. For now, this is how the company feels about some the most important aspects of the game currently:

Feats of Strength: These are currently in a stable place with which Riot feels happy.
Snowballing: There have been no significant changes based on First Blood, First Turret, Epic Objectives taken, and game length.
Voracious Atakhan: Rewards for securing the objective are too strong and game-warping.
Blood Roses: These do a good job in rewarding teams for proactively controlling these spaces.
Noxian Summoner's Rift: Changes are coming in Act 2 to make the map feel less "dark, gloomy and eye-straining."

Arena Returns with Act 2

The Arena game mode has been announced to official return to League of Legends with Act 2 of Season 2025. Moreover, to keep the feeling of the game fresh, all of the maps for Arena have been overhauled using player feedback for what should be improved.

A brand new map called the Reckoner Arena will also be added to this game mode. This new map will feature destructible pillars which will collapse if they take enough damage.

Reckoner Arena will be the latest map addition to the Arena game mode. (Credit: Riot Games)

Aside from Arena games now contributing to progressing both Champion Mastery and the Season's Battle Pass, the game mode will also be introducing a new Fame system. By completing Arena missions, you will gain Fame as a way of keeping Arena fresh and interesting while you continue gain notoriety within the fighting pits. Rewards for gaining Fame will include new Augments among other things.

Arena will introduce a new feature called Guests of Honor. These guests will make Arena fights more interesting and distinct from one another by applying specific rules to a match. For instance, having Mordekaiser as the Guest of Honor will make it so that one player from each team will start combat in the Death Realm.

These guests will not be selected randomly, however. Instead, every player in the lobby will be given the option to vote for the Guest of Honor they would like to see at the start of each round.

More updates coming to League of Legends

To cap things off, Riot Games announced several other changes that will be coming to the game in recent months. These include all of the following.

Updated Champion Mastery Emotes will be coming out in March.
The Blue Essence Emporium is returning at the start of April.
Next Battle Pass will see an increase in Blue Essence amounts.
New matchmaking system, True Skill 2, will be tried on Swiftplay and ARAM games starting late February.
Clash will occur every two months instead of monthly, to allow for more work to be done on the new matchmaking system.
Season 2 is set to be a "palate-cleanser" after so much focus on Noxus

Overall, Riot Games is paying close attention to the way in which the latest wave of changes to the game can affect the player experience, and working at addressing anything with which they don't feel content, while keeping the game as fresh as possible.

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Featured Image Credit: Riot Games