What’s the current state of League of Legends pro play meta?

With the 2025 competitive season entering its last few months of action and peaking at the League of Legends World Championship, it’s time to break down the pro play meta. 

Understanding the main trends and the takeaways from recent meta shifts will have major repercussions on teams’ values on the Rift, and those who can quickly adapt to the new meta will increase their chances of locking in a spot at Worlds later in October. 

We will examine how the meta is evolving and which playstyles or drafts might define the foreseeable future, assuming Riot doesn’t decide to drop game-changing updates in the next two months. 

The League of Legends pro play meta remains broadly similar to recent months; however, several emerging trends are reshaping how teams draft and execute. Team compositions are still heavily teamfight-focused, but there’s a growing shift toward front-to-back setups built around hyper-scaling carries. This subtle evolution is influencing champion priorities across every role — and redefining responsibilities in-game

The rise of late-game carries has notably changed the bot lane dynamics and, inherently, the rest of the map. Instead of prioritising lane dominance, many teams are leaning toward weaker-laning ADCs paired with enchanter supports. This shift stems largely from recent nerfs to tank engage supports such as Alistar and Braum, which have reduced hard engage options in the bot lane. There are still champions like Rell and Neeko available, but with Fearless Draft implemented, teams will quickly find themselves without options starting from the second game onwards of best-of-series.

With teams lacking engage options in the support role, having only the jungler acting as the potential engager would be too restrictive and would diminish teams’ overall proactiveness. Strong teams will still look to find opportunities to punish the opponents to open up leads if given the option. 

As a result, the primary engage role has shifted to the top lane, where tank frontliners like Sion and Ornn are becoming more common. Ornn, in particular, fits the role perfectly — he’s able to tank damage as a frontline while also providing reliable teamfight initiation with his ultimate. Though rarely a staple at the highest level, he has already been picked 39 times in tier-one play this summer (according to gol.gg), ranking seventh among top lane champions. Expect his presence to grow — even if the Fearless Draft format means he can only be played once per series, forcing teams to use him strategically.

Even though there is an increasing presence of scaling ADCs like Sivir, Aphelios, and the newly released Yunara, teams still have to carefully select how they want to structure every team composition. It’s not just about locking in the priority picks, but it’s also important to choose champions that can be played into the opponent’s team compositions. Champions like Xayah and Ezreal are perfect examples for this: while they are not in their strongest state, both are great against short-range team compositions with heavy engage tools, thus explaining their relatively high play rate. 

This is a big contrast to previous seasons, where teams would just play the same ADCs over and over again. Seeing more diversity makes the game more dynamic for fans, and while it’s been artificially imposed by Fearless Draft, it’s still a positive effect on the viewing experience.

Looking ahead to Worlds 2025, the pro meta appears poised to settle into patient, late-game scaling drafts. Teams will still look to play proactively through their junglers to push the tempo and dictate the pace, but composed play and well-executed teamfights will eventually lead to higher chances of success.

A potential disruptor lies in the AP jungle pool. Riot has recently buffed several magic damage junglers in an attempt to shift away from the heavy-melee jungler bruiser meta of champions like Xin Zhao, Wukong, and Jarvan IV, among others. 

If targeted buffs and nerfs push newer champions into the meta and reduce the power of aforementioned picks, then we might see yet another shift. This could potentially see a shift away from mid-lane mages to more proactive champions that can help the jungler get leads in the early game. Champions like Sylas and Ahri might return once again to prominence if that were the case. 

Conclusion

Across professional play, three meta-defining trends have emerged:

With Worlds 2025 qualification on the line over the next month, the teams that rise above the rest will be those able to pivot better between different team compositions and playstyles. Teamfighting will always be the centre of attention for teams, but adapting to draft bans and finding ways to counter the enemy team compositions will also be beneficial.