A League of Legends data miner has leaked that a new type of cosmic, finishers, is coming to the game. Finishers are a common cosmetic feature on Valorant skins.
Riot Games makes tons of cosmetics every year across its live services titles, and it looks like the developer is bringing ideas from its FPS game to the MOBA. Finishers are part of Valorant gun skin packages that happen when a player finds the last kill of the round.
These animations range from the entire map changing color with music playing, to a dragon breathing fire on the enemy as they fall to the ground.
According to the leaker, SkinSpotlights on X who found code for the animation on the PBE, the League of Legends finishers will revolve around the Nexus exploding, probably with a custom animation for every player to see at the end of the game.
New cosmetic option, Finisher specifically in the game client its "NexusFinisher" pic.twitter.com/6zNIno9pNB
— SkinSpotlights (@SkinSpotlights) September 18, 2024
League of Legends has hundreds of skins and bundles, but Riot hasn’t developed cosmetics that change how the Nexus explodes or highlight eliminations in-game outside some of the more elaborate skins like Faker’s Ahri bundle.
The developer has implemented finisher-type animation in limited-time modes in the past, like Ultra Rapid Fire, which added animations to enemy eliminations like an orbital laser. These were less elaborate than their Valorant counterparts, and haven’t been seen since 2016 outside of a few skins that reward pentakills.
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This isn’t a completely new concept for League of Legends, but having a cosmetic solely devoted to finishing enemies would be an entirely new category of item to buy in the shop.
For now, the leaks have only revealed a unique finisher on Nexuses, but there’s room here for other types of cosmetics like those we’ve seen only in some of the more expensive champion skins.
In Valorant, finishers don’t create visual clutter and block player’s screens during gameplay as the cosmetic only activates after the final kill that ends the round. This is likely the same thing they were going for with unique Pentakill animations on other skins, so it’s hard to say if the LoL team would be willing to go further for special instances like solo kills or 1v2 outplays.
Riot Games has not officially announced Nexus finishers, but the developer is expected to reveal some massive updates ahead of the 2025 season soon.