“The meta is wide open,” League of Legends Gameplay Designer shares Worlds 2025 plans

With only one patch left before the League of Legends World Championship 2025, the gameplay design team has the crucial job to balance buffs, nerfs, champion priorities, and diversity, ahead of the game’s most competitive stage.

Ahead of the event, Riot Games’ Lead Gameplay Designer for League of Legends, Matt Leung-Harrison, sat down with Esports Insider to discuss Patch 25.20, which the 2025 World Championship will be played on. 

Scaling AD fighters, while also adjusting assassins such as Ahri, LeBlanc and Diana, the gameplay design team ultimately wants to ensure more varied mid-lane playstyles at Worlds. However, that’s not the only lane Riot Games is working on. Changes are coming across all roles, aiming at buffing less present champions as the team aims to guarantee a bigger champion pool for pros to choose from. 

The international tournament, hosted in China, has already locked in all qualifying teams. Now, with the stage set and only fine-tuning left to be done, the focus turns to how the global meta will take shape once the games begin.

The interview with Leung-Harrison by Cecilia Ciocchetti of Esports Insider took place just prior to the release of Patch 20’s pre-patch notes.

Leung-Harrison: So, there are a few things that we wanted to change for Patch 18. In particular, there were things like Redemption pick rate, Unsealed Spellbook on supports, a lack of AP jungles, as well as some scaling top lane fighters.

We’re still just trying to see how some of the nerfs and buffs to the AD carry meta, are going to play out — in particular, how the Yuumi buffs are going to shake out. There are only a few regions that are playing on 25.18, though, so we kind of need to monitor what’s going on over the weekend before locking down the final patch on Monday (September 29th).

Leung-Harrison: Worlds will not be on the live patch, it will be on Patch 25.20 for the duration of the tournament.

This is pretty similar to a lot of the other international tournaments. We do try to make the solo queue environment relatively stable so that the pros can continue to have a representative solo queue experience while the Worlds tournament is going on. Otherwise, too much of a disparity between solo queue and the tournament realm can be problematic.

So, we try to strike the right balance between giving pros a practice environment while keeping solo queue in a good spot.

Leung-Harrison: When we think about the Worlds meta and large esports tournaments like MSI and Worlds, we’ve historically aimed to ensure those tournaments are as diverse as possible in terms of playstyles and champions. For the top lane meta, we were seeing a lot of Gwen, Rumble, Renekton, and K’Sante. 

From that list, there wasn’t really a scaling AD fighter. So, in order to make sure that a variety of playstyles are viable — which helps champion and composition diversity — we wanted to include a scaling AD fighter like Jax. Our approach with the Jax changes is to make him more viable for pro play in a power-neutral way, though it may end up being slightly power-positive in solo queue. That’s part of our general strategy across roles.

Leung-Harrison: I would say Fearless Draft has been helpful for diversity. It means we’re naturally going to get a situation where, for example, Renekton isn’t picked every game in top lane.

Speculative changes to get a champion into pro play are more successful, especially in game five situations where the pool has been heavily filtered. We’ve definitely seen a lot of benefits — fewer changes are required to balance champions for both solo queue and pro play, and it results in more exciting games. That’s been very positive.

Leung-Harrison: Buffed, and Ahri. Yeah, if you consider Ahri an assassin. And Diana Jungle, too, if you consider Diana an assassin.

I would say assassins in general struggle to get into play unless they have specific attributes like crowd control. For example, we’re seeing a little bit of Qiyana for that reason. Ahri has Charm, LeBlanc has Ethereal Chains. Some assassins are more viable than others. We’re relatively limited in which assassins we can push, but each role should have a variety of playstyles. 

Mid lane was dominated by health-stackers and mages, so we wanted more assassin candidates to break into play. Sometimes that means power-neutral changes favouring pro play, or straight buffs if they’re underpowered overall. Akali and Sylas are already viable, but we want to broaden playstyle options.

Leung-Harrison: Camille is interesting — similar to Jax, she’s an AD scaling fighter absent from the meta. We’ve seen Gwen and Aurora on the AP side, but not many scaling AD champions. Even Gangplank or Vladimir could be interesting. We’re also watching AP junglers like Lillia, Brand, and Diana, plus potential spot picks like Hecarim, Kha’Zix, or Kindred. Vi is another under consideration.

Some regions are even looking at Zed. The jungle pool has been very fighter-heavy (Wukong, Pantheon, Trundle, Jarvan, Nocturne), so we’re trying to diversify. Mid lane feels good after buffs to burst champions, but we’re considering champions like Lissandra, Ryze, Swain, Malzahar, Aurelion Sol, or Veigar. We’ll reassess Monday after seeing regional metas after Finals.

Leung-Harrison: I think mid and jungle are the hardest. Teams want specific things out of jungle, and because jungle–mid pairings are linked, choices are constrained. Item systems also heavily impact viability. There’s also inertia — pros often take a long time to switch picks, so balance shifts can take a while to appear in tournament play.

Leung-Harrison: Not sure about secret picks, but Twitch looks strong in late drafts. Ashe has been buffed and could be viable. Pyke is impactful situationally.

We’re seeing Naafiri and some Zed. Mundo, Vex, or others could appear depending on drafts. The meta is wide open, and we’ve aimed to put many champions in a playable state.

Leung-Harrison: No, we don’t look at it on a team-by-team basis. We do look at regional trends, aggregate stats, and pick rates. What matters is understanding regional metas and playstyles. If we over-focus on one region, we risk making wrong balance calls. Holistic analysis avoids bias toward individual players or teams.