League of Legends Previews Aurelion Sol Rework

By Tanner Dedmon

Riot Games offered a brief look at one of its upcoming League of Legends champion reworks this week by showing off some of what it has planned for Aurelion Sol. Aurelion was one of several characters confirmed for a rework earlier in the year when Riot offered an update on progress made on both Udyr and Skarner. This latest preview showed off our first look at some new abilities as well as a way Riot plans to deliver on the power fantasy Aurelion's theme promotes.

Walking players through the latest on Aurelion's rework was Rob "Riot King Cobra" Rosa, the producer who's working on this champion update. Rosa reiterated an idea that Riot's put forth several times in the past: That people want to play as Aurelion based on his theme centered around being a star-forging space dragon with near limitless power, but his actual in-game identity doesn't seem to excite players nearly as much.

The goal then is to make Aurelion's new kit closer reflect the power level his lore would have him at which should honestly be at the top of pretty much all champions if an official lore power ranking existed. Rosa cautioned that the team is still early in the ideation process for Aurelion but showed off some of the ability concepts as well as the scaling plans for the champion.

"While we're still early on in ideation, a direction that we're really excited about, is having Aurelion Sol shine as a late game mage, and he expresses his godlike powers through a unique scaling fantasy," Rosa said. "So, some of Aurelion Sol's spells are going to grow larger and larger in size. As the spells grow larger in size, their visuals will evolve to reflect the new power that they have. And the goal here is that, when you get to late game, you feel like a space God."

That's interesting on its own, but what's even more notable is the new ability we see in the video around a minute in. We see Aurelion throw down a big AOE ability that has a sizable star in the middle surrounded by a larger ring. It doesn't look too dissimilar to Anivia's ultimate and seems to be able to stick around for a while before it returns to Aurelion.

As the game goes on, however, we see how this ability will change. A scene showed right afterwards depicted the ability as having a radius that almost covers the entire width of the middle lane. No opposing champions or training dummies were shown interacting with the ability, however, so it's unclear what its effects are.

Given that Riot is still early on in the ideation process for this rework, the champion may end up not having this ability at all, but Rosa reassured Aurelion players by saying the team is "doing our damnedest to make Aurelion Sol as cool as he can possibly be."

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