Shyvana’s LoL rework delayed to 2026 as devs apologize for “broken promise”
Riot GamesShyvana’s finally getting a much-deserved VGU that’ll rework both her abilities and her look in-game. Or, at least she was slated to until LoL’s new seasonal structure threw a wrench in that plan.
Despite Riot’s best efforts to buff her and bring her back into the League of Legends meta, Shyvana has long existed as a stat-stick champion who either builds full AP and one-shots with her Dragon form E, or a champion who gets enough stats and raw damage output to outtrade anyone who stands in her way.
This comes at the cost of her gameplay being generally one-dimensional and her lacking tools to gank lanes early in jungle, her most common role. While she’s maintained a niche playerbase over the years, she’s been in dire need of a rework for a while.
Fortunately, that rework has been confirmed. Although we’ll have to wait a long while until we actually see it.
Does Shyvana’s rework have a release date?
At this time, Shyvana’s rework won’t be coming until at least 2026. Skarner’s rework is ahead of her and that got delayed multiple times, so it’s difficult to say what sort of timeline we could be looking at with Shyvana’s rework.
Shyvana has suffered the same fate, with her rework being delayed into 2026 due to Arcane’s impact on League of Legends. Riot Meddler has outright confirmed and apologized for the delay, making it clear that we won’t see an update here until the far future.
“She won’t be in 2025. Completely agree the long wait here is a really poor experience for those looking forward to her update and our apologies. We’re going to avoid revealing updates like this so far in advance in the future to avoid that broken promise feeling,” he explained.
Viktor got an Arcane VGU to coincide with Arcane Season 2’s release and Ambessa Medarda’s came to League of Legends as short time before that, so it’s not overly surprising that she’s had her release date pushed back.
Shyvana’s reworked abilities in League of Legends
Not much detail has been given about her rework’s actual abilities. The reveal was incredibly vague about the team’s goals with the champion and what her rework may look like. That said, it doesn’t mean we don’t have anything to go off of.
Riot Sopebox gave some details about their overall goals with the champion:
“[Shyvana] has a great theme and has become an iconic part of the League roster. Thus, we’re thinking about refining and progressing who she is and tuning up her gameplay instead of a complete overhaul of her narrative and themes. Think more Udyr and less Skarner.”
If we look to Udyr’s rework, he retained much of his original identity. He still had his four stances, they still functioned largely the same, but he got an additional passive to amp those abilities and bring a new dimension to his gameplay.
In other words, there’s a good chance she’ll still have Dragon form. However, nothing’s set in stone just yet and we’re a ways away from release. We’ll provide more details as they come to light.