Riot's own data files tag every League of Legends champion with one or two of six roles. Across 173 champions the count is 75 mages, 60 fighters, 46 assassins, 46 tanks, 43 supports and 33 marksmen, with 130 champions carrying two tags and 43 carrying one. That is a class system. It has been balanced in public for fifteen years, and it is the starting point for any guess about what the Riot MMO's classes will be.
Nothing here is confirmed. Riot has announced no classes, and the only pre-reset comment on the subject, that the tank-healer-damage trinity had been discussed and that the team wanted to move away from the classic model, is both second-hand and three years older than the reset. What follows is what the lore and Riot's own habits point to, labelled as such.
What Riot already has
The six League roles are not classes in the MMO sense. They describe what a champion does in a team fight, not what they are, and a Noxian axe-thrower and a Void monster can share a tag. But they encode two things an MMO designer needs: a proven set of combat identities, and a proven way of blending them. Dual tags are the interesting part. A fighter-tank plays differently from a fighter-assassin, and Riot has spent a decade teaching its players to read those combinations at a glance.
A Riot MMO that ignored that vocabulary would be throwing away the one design language a hundred million people already speak.
What the lore adds
League's roles say nothing about where power comes from. Runeterra does. The setting has at least eight distinct systems of magic and technology, each tied to a region, each with its own rules and its own look.
Hextech, Piltover's industrialised magic, and chemtech, Zaun's chemical answer to it, are the two that Arcane made famous. Ionia's spirit magic draws on the realm beside the world. Ixtal's elemental magic is the oldest formal school on the continent. Demacia's petricite does not make magic, it kills it, and a mage-hunter built on that is a class no other setting has. Shurima's sun magic made gods. Targon's Aspects lend celestial power to a chosen host. The Freljord has True Ice, shamanism and the Iceborn. The Void offers a corruption you can wield until it wields you, which Kai'Sa's biography describes in detail.
Put the two lists together and you get a grid: a combat role from League, a source of power from a region. A hextech marksman is not a chemtech marksman, and neither is an Ionian one. The grid is roughly six by eight, which is more than any MMO wants at launch and exactly the kind of thing a studio prunes to a dozen.
The trinity question
The tank-healer-damage triangle is the genre's oldest argument, and the pre-reset comment that Riot wanted "to move away from the classic model" is the only hint of where the studio stood.
Two facts complicate it. League has no healers in the MMO sense; its supports shield, buff and control, and the handful who heal do so as a secondary job. Riot has never built a game around the healer role, and its designers' instincts run toward damage mitigation and crowd control instead. And the studio's June 2026 hire, Brian Holinka, spent a decade on the game that defined the trinity, which is the reason we say in what the Holinka hire tells us that combat is where the reset's promise of something "different enough" will be tested first.
The precedents are not encouraging for anyone hoping the trinity is gone. Guild Wars 2 launched in 2012 without dedicated healers and added them; Final Fantasy XIV kept the triangle and thrived on it; every action MMO that softened it has ended up rebuilding some version of it for group content. Our read is that the roles will exist under other names, that "support" will mean what it means in League, and that the difference will be in how freely a character can move between them.
Locked classes or open builds
The second old argument. A fixed class chosen at creation, as in World of Warcraft, or a character who can learn anything, as in The Elder Scrolls Online or Final Fantasy XIV's job system.
Riot's habits point one way. League is a game of picking a character, and the identity that comes with the pick is the company's business model. A Riot MMO in which your class is a firm choice with a firm look is the one that sells skins. Against that, an MMO built for a player's "time" rather than their commitment, which is what Greg Street promised in 2021, is one where switching roles does not mean starting over. Final Fantasy XIV's solution, one character who can be every job, is the model that satisfies both, and it is the one we would bet on if forced.
A launch list, as a guess
Labelled as speculation, and pruned the way a studio would prune it: a dozen classes, each pairing one of League's roles with one of Runeterra's power sources, with the regions supplying the visual identity rather than separate classes of their own. Something like a hextech marksman, a chemtech brawler, an Ionian blade, an Ixtali elementalist, a Demacian mage-hunter, a Shuriman sun priest, a Targonian aspect-host, a Freljordian shaman, a Void-touched assassin, a Noxian warrior, a Bilgewater gunslinger, and a Shadow Isles necromancer. Not all of those would survive contact with a design team. The shape would.
The one certainty is that the classes will be recognisable to League players, because that is the audience, and unrecognisable to World of Warcraft players in at least one important way, because that is what the reset was for.
What we do not know
Whether classes exist at all in the traditional sense. The reset's "different enough" could mean a classless system, and Riot has not said.
How healing works, if it does.
Whether regions are classes, races, or cosmetics. We work through the race side of that in playable races.
Whether any of the pre-reset thinking on this survived. Our scorecard for the 2021 promises is in what is left of the 2021 vision, and the trinity comment sits there as "uncertain". For everything Riot has confirmed, which on this subject is nothing, see everything we actually know about the Riot MMO.