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Riot Games reveals League of Legends 2023 plans including champs & Ranked changes

Visual updates to Ahri, a full rework of Aurelion Sol, new champs like Milio and Naafiri, and new Ranked Split Resets and rewards were detailed.

TJ Denzer

January 9, 2023 7:45 AM

Image via Riot Games

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With another year begins another long road to the Worlds championship in League of Legends. Riot is kicking off the 2023 season of the game and with it comes all sorts of plans. However, those who are itching to know what comes next will be happy to hear that Riot shared a ton of its upcoming content, including new plans for Ranked Split Resets and rewards, a rework of Aurelion Sol, a visual update to Ahri, new champ teases, and much more.

Riot Games revealed the early roadmap and plans for League of Legends 2023 in a press release on January 9, 2023. There’s even an accompanying YouTube video giving a rundown of the goods.

A rework befitting the Star Forger, Aurelion Sol

Aurelion Sol has always been one of the trickiest League of Legends champions to use. His original mechanics utilize an orbit of stars for fast damage-over-time when the carousel-like attack is used properly. Unfortunately, it was just too hard to use against more viable champs. Aurelion Sol’s new kit ditches the star orbit in favor of a new area-of-effect and damage-over-time kit.

His Q ability channels fire breath at enemies that bursts if he keeps it on them long enough while his E ability places a black hole that damages enemies in range and will outright kill any in the middle if their percent of health is low enough. He still keeps his Astral Flight that lets him position quickly nearly anywhere on the map, but his ultimate now looks like a larger version of Veigar’s Dark Matter comet drop. You can read up on all of Aurelion Sol’s new abilities on his new character page.

New Champions and new looks

Further teased content coming in the near future includes a visual rework of Ahri and two new champions already confirmed. For Ahri, the update is simply a visual upgrade of everything she has going on. Her base look, VFX, splashes, and Nine Tails form will be spruced up and polished. What’s more, these updates will be applied to pretty much all of her skins as well.

On the new champion side, players can expect what sounds like a spell-casting support and a midlane assassin in the opening volley of new characters for League of Legends. Riot Games didn’t share much detail here yet, but they did outright confirm the following: “Milio, a male enchanter from Ixtal, and Naafiri, a female midlane Darkin assassin.” We’ll keep an eye out for more details on these two new characters later in 2023.

Finally, we got some confirmation on skins coming down the pipeline this year. In addition to planned skins for Kalista, Aurelion Sol, Ivern, and Kled, here’s what’s confirmed so far:

• Lunar Empress Ashe
• Lunar Guardian Kha'Zix
• Lunar Empress Qiyana
• Lunar Guardian Malphite
• Lunar Emperor Thresh
• Mythmaker Galio
• Mythmaker Garen
• Mythmaker Irelia (Legendary)
• Mythmaker Sivir
• Mythmaker Zyra
• Prestige Mythmaker Sivir
• Prestige Porcelain Lissandra

Ranked Split Reset and rewards

Ranked is facing a considerable change in how it is carried out for League of Legends in 2023. Now, when the Ranked Splits come up in the season, they will feature new Resets that will refresh the game and offer rewards to players for their effort through each Ranked period. As the press release says, this is meant to “address pain points around the stress of avoiding decay or demotion in the middle of the year.”

Furthermore, players will no longer have to achieve Gold rank to get their mitts on a reward skin at the end of the season. Now there will be a reward skin for every ranked tier from Iron to Challenger with chromas for the skin awarded based on how high you ranked. The new Ranked Split Reset also means there will be two skin rewards for Ranked this year, as well as emoticons, icons, and Ranked borders.

It would seem League of Legends has a lot in store for players right out of the gate in 2023. With some details still up in the air, such as the new Champions and planned skins, and Aurelion’s rework release date, stay tuned for further updates. We’ll have them right here at Shacknews as they become available.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.