Dragons are two objectives wearing one health bar: a buff race everyone watches, and a map editor that fires twice and then locks. Here's every element, every soul, and what the pit is really asking you to do.
League of Legends Guide
Dragons & Elemental Rifts
Summoner's Rift ObjectivesDragons are two objectives wearing one health bar: a buff race everyone watches, and a map editor that fires twice and then locks.
The second one is the part that decides games. Whichever element wins the roll rewrites terrain, grows plants, opens portals, hands out free movement speed, and in one case starts quietly paying the team that's losing. This guide covers the rotation, all six rifts and their souls, the mechanic that makes your fourth dragon harder than your first, and what Elder actually does when it finally shows up.
How the rotation works
Six elements share the pit, and the order is part random, part locked in by what's already died.
- 5:00 One of the six drakes spawns, drawn at random. The first five minutes of every game are played without knowing what you're playing for.
- Second Five minutes after the first one dies, a new element spawns, and it's never a repeat of an element already taken.
- Third Once the second drake dies and the third's element is drawn, the Rift transforms into that element's map. From here the pit stops rotating and every drake is the same one.
- Fourth The team that reaches four stacks first takes the Dragon Soul of the dominant element, permanently.
- After The camp only spawns Elder Dragon from then on, on a six-minute timer.
Two consequences fall out of that. Only the rift-dominant element can ever be stacked to four, so the first two drakes are the only ones whose buffs you'll hold at one stack each for the rest of the game. And the next spawn is never a mystery: its insignia sits on the spawn timer and on the wall of the alcove, so a team can prepare for the exact drake that's coming.
One more quiet detail. While an Elemental Rift is up, newly spawned jungle monsters take on draconic versions of their effects and glow to show it. Baron's arrival severs that permanently for everything that spawns afterward, which makes the two objective systems genuinely exclusive rather than merely competing.
The six rifts
Each element does three separate things: it changes the map, it gives your team a stacking buff, and it decides which soul is on the table. Here's all of it in one place.
Infernal
MapThe walls by the pit entrance burn away and ten extra Blast Cones grow around the map. Infernal Cinders drop in clusters every 20 seconds, weighted toward the half of the map belonging to whoever's behind on gold.
CindersEach pickup gives a burst of movement speed and a permanent point of ability haste with no cap. Die holding more than five and half the excess spills onto the ground for anyone to collect.
Stacks3% to 12% attack damage and ability power.
SoulAttacks and abilities explode on the target for adaptive damage to everything nearby.
Mountain
MapRock formations rise by both buff camps, the blue-side raptors and the dragon pit entrance, narrowing the ground a fight can happen on.
Stacks5% to 20% armor and magic resist.
SoulFive seconds without taking damage grants a large shield that scales with your build.
Ocean
MapSix brush patches grow larger, two of them at the dragon pit itself, twelve puddles form in the jungle and four extra Honeyfruit spawn near mid and red buff.
StacksRestore 2% to 8% of missing health every five seconds.
SoulDamaging anything heals you and restores mana over four seconds, at 30% strength against minions and monsters.
Cloud
MapSpeed zones settle over both buff camps, the raptors and the dragon pit, granting 20% movement speed inside them and 35% while out of combat. Six extra Scryer's Blooms spawn near the base gates and river tribushes.
Stacks5% to 20% slow resist and out-of-combat movement speed.
Soul15% movement speed, spiking to 60% for six seconds after you cast your ultimate.
Hextech
MapFour pairs of Hex-gates. Each base gets a one-way trip to its own wolves and its own red buff. The other two pairs connect a blue buff camp to the ground behind an objective pit, and those run in both directions.
Stacks5 to 20 ability haste and 5% to 20% attack speed.
SoulDamage chains lightning to up to three nearby enemies for bonus true damage and a heavy decaying slow.
Chemtech
MapFourteen extra Scryer's Blooms and eight extra Honeyfruit. The blooms now reveal an area and drop every ward caught in it to 1 health, while giving the popping team 40% movement speed in the direction the pollen went. Blast Cones throw twice as far and Honeyfruit shield instead of slowing.
Stacks6% to 24% tenacity and heal and shield power.
SoulBelow half health, deal 13% more damage and take 13% less.
Vision is cheaper to break on a Chemtech map than on any other rift, and the plant that breaks it also shoves the team that popped it toward whatever just got revealed. Learn where those fourteen blooms sit, because the enemy jungler already has.
Ancient Grudge, or why your fourth dragon is the slow one
Drakes remember. Every Dragon Slayer stack your team already holds makes the next drake take 15% less damage from your champions, up to 60% at four stacks.
That single line does a lot of work. The team on three stacks is walking into a fight against a much tankier dragon while the team on zero hits it at full strength, which is exactly why so many soul points get stolen by the side that looked hopelessly behind on the objective. If you're the one closing it out, bring more than you think you need. If you're the one down 0-3, the smite fight is more winnable than the scoreboard suggests.
Soul point is a door closing
Four elemental dragons buys the soul, and it's also the last elemental drake anybody gets. That's the part teams misread. A team on three stacks isn't slightly ahead on an objective, they're one fight away from taking the objective off the map entirely, along with every dragon the other side was still counting on.
Souls are permanent, they apply to the whole team, and they don't drop on death. They also don't all do the same job. Infernal and Hextech add damage to everything you already do, which shows up in the next teamfight. Mountain and Ocean pay teams that survive fights rather than end them quickly. Cloud is the one that changes where you can be rather than how hard you hit, and Chemtech only wakes up once you're in trouble.
Elder Dragon
Elder replaces the drakes once a soul is claimed, respawns every six minutes, and starts at level 13 with 250 health regenerated per second. That regeneration is why chipping at it accomplishes nothing at all. Riot has said outright that Baron would lose a fight against it, and the reason given was the healing.
Its buff, Aspect of the Dragon, lasts 150 seconds and dies with you. It burns every enemy you damage for true damage, and any champion you hit below 20% of their maximum health simply gets executed after a short delay.
Practically, that turns a won fight into an ended game. Elder plus a soul is the standard way a team closes at forty minutes, so treat the Elder timer as a fight timer and get vision down long before it lands.
How to actually play the pit
- Contest the first two hardest. They pick the terrain everyone plays on for the rest of the game, and no later dragon can change it back.
- Check the insignia on the spawn timer, then draft your next few minutes around the map you're about to get rather than the one you have.
- Treat the enemy's soul point as an objective in its own right. Denying it is worth more than taking a fourth drake you were never going to reach first.
- Trading an early drake for grubs or Herald is fine. Trading soul point for anything short of Baron usually isn't.
- On Cloud and Chemtech maps, expect collapses from further away than normal. Both hand out movement speed for free.
- Ward the pit before the timer, not when it hits zero. Two enlarged brush patches on an Ocean map exist specifically to hide five people.
Frequently asked questions
What time does the first dragon spawn?
5:00, with a fresh drake five minutes after each one dies.
How many dragons do you need for the soul?
Four. The fourth kill grants the soul of whichever element transformed the map, and no elemental drake spawns after that.
Can the same dragon spawn twice in a row?
Not before the map locks. The first three are all different elements, and from the third onward the pit only spawns the dominant one.
When does the map change?
After the second drake dies and the third one's element is decided. The transformation is permanent for that game.
Why does the enemy team kill dragons faster than we do?
Ancient Grudge. Drakes gain 15% damage reduction against your champions per Dragon Slayer stack your team already holds, so the side that's behind on dragons hits them hardest.
The short version
Play the first two dragons like they decide the terrain, because they do. Play the fourth like it ends something, because it does. Everything in between is the map you already agreed to.
For the other end of the river, our Baron Nashor guide covers what's waiting up top, and the full Summoner's Rift objective guide lays out every camp on one timeline. If you want to be strong enough to contest any of it, our lane advantages list is where that starts.
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