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UPDATE: On Wednesday morning, Riot released a teaser trailer for the official Annie lore update. The headline has been reflected to show this. This story will continue to be updated as Riot releases more information on the changes.
ANNIE pic.twitter.com/9G4PSgDg4B
— League of Legends (@LeagueOfLegends) January 31, 2018
The video is in a slightly different style than we’re used to seeing, making it almost seem spooky, as well as more serious.
Various League of Legends Facebook pages have changed their account icons to an image of a fiery flower.
While there are lots of champions that this imagery could be associated with, it seems that Annie’s Universe page has been updated with the same image and the vague phrase “Her story begins in the ashes.”
It should be noted that her biography page has been changed to this, which means we could be seeing big changes to her background as well as other lore. Could this be a new lore event on the horizon?
Moobeat of Surrender@20 also noted that we saw a similar icon in the Patch 8.2 Public Beta Environment cycle.
This looks similar to a burning flower icon that we saw in the 8.2 PBE cycle that has yet to be released: pic.twitter.com/1vlX8r7DRo
— Moobeat (@moobeat) January 29, 2018
Since this burning flower seems linked to the Universe website, we can probably rule out the idea of an Annie rework. She’s not even on Riot Games’ champion update list, so this is definitely a lore-based thing and not a gameplay thing.