Season 2026 Ivern Impressions

Hi, it's been a while since I last posted here. It's been almost 2 years now, and as you might imagine I have many more thoughts about Ivern that have accumulated during that time. However, let's talk about current events.

Earlier this week, Riot announced their dev update for the upcoming 2026 season changes. Major changes to items, roles, vision, and towers will make the game feel noticeably unfamiliar on the patch. In this post, I'd like to go over some of my observations and predictions for the upcoming season.

Role Quests

With the new season, each role has its own quest to be completed. The way that you advance them varies slightly between roles, but can be summarized as normal actions taken from playing the game such as farming, getting kills or getting kills. You can expect to finish them at around 10-15 minutes into the game with each role getting their own specialized reward upon completion. These include:

Out of the rewards listed, it's clear that Top and Bot have the biggest impact. In theory, this means that they own a larger share of the control over a given game. Another way to read these changes is that in a standard game of League of Legends:

• Top will always have the advantage of being ahead of the curve in levels and will consistently be the strongest champions on the map.
• However, bot will eventually overtake them as the strongest champions in the game if given the chance to scale past 5 items.

Keep in mind that control over a game is zero-sum. If one role (or player) is taking more agency, it means that everyone else will have less.

As for how Ivern fits into this, I'm of the belief that these changes are strongly positive for him. Ivern is particularly good at playing around a strong standout carry, so potentially having a hard-snowballing top or hard-scaling ADC will give Ivern jungle more consistent options to play through.

Speaking of jungle, the switch to 35 pet stacks instead of 40 is a massive buff. Ivern is the best gustwalker user in the game since he can make his own bushes, so being able to complete it 2-3 minutes sooner makes a large difference. As a champion whose entire clear consists of walking, Ivern is also the champion who benefits most from the quest's new MS bonus since his clear speed is determined by how fast he can walk between camps.

Jungle Ivern isn't the only winner either. Since Daisy scales mostly with levels rather than stats, having a higher level cap and increased xp is hugely beneficial for Ivern. This is just one of a few factors that increase the strength of Ivern top, and there will be more as we continue going over the changes.

Overall, the new quests greatly benefit Ivern regardless of if you want to play a carry or supporting role.

Items

The new season brought 9 new items and a few reworks to existing ones. Here are the ones that were potentially relevant to Ivern:

When I first saw this item, I was excited. Cosmic Drive-like stats with attack speed and a Spellblade passive without having to build Lich Bane? Unfortunately, the doubled On-Hit does not work on Ivern's W passive, making it a mere 10% AP ratio. This can hardly be considered worth it for the price. Unless it gets fixed to work with Ivern W, stick to Cosmic Drive or Bloodletter's Curse when looking for a bulky AP item.

Diadem is a great item gated by Ivern having a hard time stacking Tear in the jungle. For reference, it takes about 15 minutes to stack tear from when you buy it, whereas other champions will be fully stacked roughly 8 minutes from purchase. This means you can buy tear on first base and barely have it complete by 3rd item.

If you do manage to complete it, the healing passive is excellent. Even without any other mana items, it heals more than old Moonstone while also requiring less actions (it will always passively heal every second while in combat). A big benefit of this item is that you can reap the benefits of Consonance while shielding yourself and tanking, which allows you to play fights further up and more flexibly.

If I can find better strategies to accelerate Tear stacking in the jungle, this item has a lot of potential. I will be keeping my eye on it.

Actualizer is an item which might seem like it has some uses, but in practice costs too much for a mediocre payoff. The first thing of note is that it scales with bonus mana (+1% per 200 bonus mana). This means that to make full use of the active, you'll need to have been stacking tear items. Even then, let's say you have Diadem and Actualizer in your build for a 21.5% power-up. Could that even be considered worth it for 3100g? Why not just buy items that give H&Sp?

Even when playing AP, this item gets outclassed by both damage items (Nashor's Tooth, Lich Bane, Rabadon's) and utility items (Zhonya's, Cosmic Drive, Bloodletter's Curse).

Something I noticed is that you don't actually have to pay the full double mana cost to get the amplification. If you throw a Q and then activate Actualizer before it lands, you will get the increased damage. This is also true for summoning Daisy at the normal price and then using Actualizer afterwards to deal increased damage. I don't foresee this item ever being useful on Ivern, but if it gets buffed in the future this may become useful tech.

This item is very strong. It's the new cheapest legendary item (if we exclude Mejai's) at 2000g and provides a lot of potential value. This might sound strange, but it fulfills a similar niche as Cosmic Drive on Ivern. The 20 Movement Speed is the same amount as Cosmic Drive's passive, and the HP and resists help you play further up in a fight to lock down targets. The attack speed not only helps your allies, but is also useful for Ivern himself when dealing damage.

While the stats lack a few essentials like AP or H&Sp, these deficiencies are more than made up for by the price being 2000g. Overall great item for Ivern.

Echoes of Helia has always been a strange item. In all of its iterations, it has rewarded a pattern of Attack -> Shield Ally -> Repeat. This works for some champions like Sona who naturally play that way, but Ivern doesn't fall into that category. He certainly does damage, but this often comes after shielding Daisy or himself. Trying to do damage while shielding allies carries a higher risk of Daisy dying or Ivern getting punished for hitting at 475 range. It's much more common for Ivern to either be dealing damage or shielding allies, not both at the same time.

With that in mind, the new Echoes of Helia doesn't do anything to change this pattern. It's a bit better since it scales off of damage instead of the amount of hits, but the fundamental problem still persists. If you're only going to get 1-2 heals off in a fight, wouldn't Redemption be the more consistent choice?

With Redemption changed from having 200HP to 30 AP, it joins Staff of Flowing Water as the only items with a combination of AP, H&Sp, and Haste. The build path has also been changed to be identical to Staff with Fiendish Codex replacing Kindlegem, making it much more comfortable as a first item.

When building the old Redemption as 1st item, the most optimal play pattern would be to throw yourself into enemies, self shield, and cast Redemption on yourself and the enemy you're locking down. This would make use of the bonus health for tanking while also setting up consistent redemption value. With the stats adjusted, tanking is no longer required to get full value and it will play more like a normal enchanter item.

Now let's talk about my favorite new build so far: Heal Tank Ivern. After your first recall, start with Boots + Tear + Dark Seal (1050g). Your first item will be Bandlepipes, and the 2000g price tag allows you to fit Tear in early without setting yourself too far behind. Helia comes after Bandlepipes and Diadem fits into the 3rd slot when your tear is fully stacked.

The combination of Diadem and Helia allows you to unload Helia's charges through Diadem's passive healing. This leaves you free to deal damage while shielding yourself and Daisy. Bandlepipes not only is cheap enough to allow for an early Tear, but also grants the stats to play further up and the movement speed to maneuver and fall back if needed.

I'd have to test it against good players to tell you if it's actually good (PBE isn't the best for these things), but I find the concept promising.

Faelights and Vision Control

Faelights are a new mechanic which add special locations on the map granting additional vision when warded. The game starts with 2 on each team's base gates (4 total), and 2 on each side of the map's river (4 total).

The ones by the gates make it more difficult to push into the enemy base by offering guaranteed vision for the defending team. That being said, there are times when they can be used to an attacking team's advantage if they use a blue trinket on it to quickly reveal a large portion of the enemy jungle.

One of the interesting interactions with the gate faelights is that an attacking team can place a control ward in this bush to prevent the defending team from getting vision. Unlike normal ward behavior, if the defending team places a ward here, they will not even get a flash of vision from the faelights.

That being said, Ivern doesn't have to worry about this issue as he can place a bush before his team places the ward, allowing the faelights to trigger without interference from the control ward. While I don't think this is OP, I can imagine it being very obnoxious to play against (especially when trying to siege into a tower with even more Ivern bushes).

Now let's look at the river faelights:

With 1 ward in pixel and 1 ward in banana bush, you can have full coverage of the entire enemy jungle. These make both ganking and invading significantly harder, especially during laning phase. These locations are significant objectives in the early game, and I'm of the belief that they will become contested objectives for laners to get prio over and junglers/supports to sweep when they have free time.

After the 2nd drag is killed and elemental map changes, a total of 4 additional faelights will spawn, one by each sidelane t2 tower.

These are meant to help splitpushers, but should not have a major impact on how Ivern wants to assist in the sidelane. Ivern mostly prefers to stand behind his teammate down the lane rather than cut through the jungle. If he does walk through the jungle, it's usually after they've committed which makes the faelights do as much as a normal ward would.

With the general idea out of the way, let's get into some of the details of vision changes. Here are some of my observations:

• Stealth Ward (Yellow Trinket) has had its cooldown reduced by roughly 20% (from 210-120s to 170-90s).
• Oracle Lens (Red Trinket) has had its duration increased from 6s to 8s.
• You can see when you're on faelight vision while using sweeper, but only if you're currently being revealed by it.
• Faelights fully reveal all bushes in their area.
• Faelights have a duration of 45 seconds. After they expire, the remaining ward will still retain a 20% increased vision radius.
• If a new ward is placed on top of an existing ward in a faelight spot, it will be replaced. If you have 3/3 wards placed, replacing the faelight ward will still delete your oldest ward.

Amongst these observations, one of them clearly stands out as TERRIBLE for Ivern. Faelights revealing all bushes means that Ivern can no longer push into the enemy river with his W. This means no hiding Daisy summon, no Qs off vision, and no manipulating vision mid fight if the enemy support has the presence of mind to drop a ward in a location that doesn't even have to be close to you. It will certainly be difficult to get used to not being allowed to push many situations that were previously winnable.

I didn't use all caps and bold for the word "terrible" for no reason.

Tower Incentives

In this update, a few changes were made to towers to encourage pushing. The biggest change is Crystalline Overgrowth.

Over time, turrets will become crystalized until a champion hits them. When hit, the crystals explode, causing a burst of true damage.

This change shouldn't impact Ivern jungle much. I can see a scenario where you'd want to hover a laner so they can pop the crystals safely, but faelights already grant them so much protection so it may not even be necessary.

On the other hand, this is a great buff for Ivern top and mid. Since Daisy can pop the crystals, Ivern can recall in a safe location while sending Daisy to get a single punch on the tower risklessly.

Another change made was giving plates to tier 2 and 3 towers.

Instead of giving a large lump sum, T2 and T3 towers will now have that gold split across 5 plates. This shouldn't be impactful for Ivern in any role, but it does make coming back into a game easier on the whole since cross-mapping while giving an objective will always amount to something, even if you can't fully kill the tower.

This may also be a buff to Rift Herald since you can use it to take a T1 tower and collect extra plates from crashing it into the T2 afterwards.

Homeguards

Instead of lasting until you exit the base, Homeguards now lasts until you reach your T1 tower (and until you reach your most pushed minion wave later into the game). There was a lot of outrage from high elo players over this change, but I feel like I understand why such a change was made.

With role quests, there is already an inherent advantage given to the winning player (completing the role quest 1-2min earlier). I see the Homeguards change as a counterbalance to the added snowballing nature of quest rewards. The Crystalline Overgrowth also provides an instant advantage to the player with push, meaning it's easier to collect plates without having to stay in lane following a solokill.

As for Ivern, there aren't many specific optimizations that I can make of this. Just make sure you're running down lanes from base instead of directly into your jungle to benefit from the extra MS.

Minion and Monster Spawning

One of the most interesting changes for Ivern specifically is the shift in initial minion and monster spawn times. In the new season, minions and monsters have had their initial spawn times moved back by 35 seconds. This seems like a mundane change to cut down on wait time, and for every other champion it probably is, but for Ivern it holds a crucial detail.

While the minion and monster times are pushed back, the neutral objectives still spawn at the same time. Because of Ivern's weird delayed clears, he would usually take his second respawn of camps at around 5:30. The problem is the kind of map state this creates when they respawn.

Notice how in this map state, Ivern's camps are respawning at around the same time as grubs? This forces a vulnerability in his pathing and allows for the enemy to either take the grubs for free while Ivern is marking, force Ivern to skip camps and lose smite charges later, or fall behind in tempo. However, if the monsters spawn 35 seconds earlier, this makes the spawn timers much more comfortable where Ivern has time to mark his camps before contesting grubs.

This might seem like a niche or minor scenario, but I'd like to point out that this is a dilemma that Ivern has to face every game. Being able to contest grubs without any major tradeoffs or sacrifices significantly increases Ivern's objective pressure. I'm not sure how many other Ivern players realize how big of a deal this is, but when I read this I can think of countless past games that would turn from losses to wins under this change.

Additionally, minion wave spawn rate will ramp up starting from 25 seconds in the midgame and then 20 seconds in the late game. This decrease in time between waves will cut down on roaming between lanes and encourage sieging. This does impact how Ivern will prioritize plays, but I don't think it's particularly positive or negative as Ivern is able to play both ways competently.

What will the meta look like?

It's difficult to say exactly how the meta will go, but I can simplify my thoughts into 2 general directions. Either:

1. Top and Bot are much stronger because of their role quests. Their lane prio also becomes difficult to interrupt as they control faelight vision. This leaves jungle much weaker and who wins jungle becomes further decided by who wins lanes.
2. Role quests grant heightened snowballing for Top/Bot, but individual leads are hard to get due to the homeguard buffs. This leaves junglers as the ones who can tip the scales and help their lanes snowball, ultimately still holding the most agency over the game.

In reality, the meta will likely be some mix of these two. We can interpret this as gank windows being harder to find and carrying higher risk, but also holding bigger rewards.

As for where Ivern fits into this picture, it's also hard to say. There are 2 possibilities to consider:

1. Ivern is a champion who prefers low-risk with marginal rewards as he has more timers than other junglers to play off of. A game where laners have much higher vision coverage leads to less opportunities, which then leaves Ivern with nothing to do while his camps are ticking.
2. The fewer valid gank timers make being less predictable and having more pathing flexibility major advantages. In this environment, Ivern is able to more easily match the perfect timers and excel through well-timed ganks that snowball his laners.

Once again, let's try to understand the mix of these two. Ivern likely won't be able to spam gank as much, but his flexibility is still an advantage in catching laners off guard and finding weird timings. In practice, this means that your playstyle will be more patient and reserved, but not necessarily weaker or stronger.

As for Ivern's overall strength, I think he'll be decently stronger. Not being able to use bushes in faelight vision feels terrible, but the role quest system, jungle pet at 35 instead of 40, and minion spawn changes disproportionately favor him. To be honest, it may even be enough to get him nerfed.

I'd like to stress that this is all just speculation. The only things I have to go off of is PBE norms against gold players, so I haven't yet gotten an accurate view into how the game will play out at a high level. For now, I'm excited to see how it'll turn out (and curious to see how accurate my predictions end up).

Anyways, thanks for reading!