League of Legends: How to get Blue Essence

What is Blue Essence?

Blue Essence is represented by a blue shard logo and it’s one of the main currencies in League of Legends. You’ll use it to unlock new Champions and other additional features like Rune Pages and cosmetic items.

Your total Blue Essence count can be found at the top right of the client – look out for the blue shard icon.

Blue Essence was first introduced in 2016, replacing IP in patch V7.22 as the primary way of unlocking content without having to spend real world currency.

More great League of Legends guides:

• 1. Beginner Champs – LoL: Best Beginner Champions guide
• 2. Hotkeys – LoL: Best hotkeys and keybindings
• 3. Fast Levelling – LoL: How to level up fast
• 4. Mouse Settings – LoL: Best mouse DPI and settings guide
• 5. Aphelios – LoL: Aphelios guide

How do I get Blue Essence?

There are a variety of ways to get hold of the blue stuff, so we’ve broken down all the methods you can do so just below.

– Reach Summoner Level 5 –

To get started, you’ll need to play enough matches and earn XP to reach Summoner level 5. Once you’ve done so, you’ll start receiving items called Champion Capsules every time you level up from this point. We’ll explain their significance below, but it’s the key to unlocking ways to start building that big pile of Blue Essence.

– Champion Capsules and Champion Shards –

When you’ve reached Summoner level 5, you’ll start receiving one Champion Capsule every time you level up. Crack these open and they’ll have a chance to contain all sorts of things including Key Fragments, Ward Skins, Emotes, Raw Blue Essence, and of course Champion Shards.

Champion Shards have three main uses:

• Combine them with Blue Essence to permanently unlock a Champion.
• One Shard can be consumed to temporarily unlock a Champion for 7 days.
• Can be disenchanted into Blue Essence.
• There’s a chance you’ll receive a Permanent Shard instead of a regular one. You can disenchant them for more Blue Essence.

So, another way to earn Blue Essence is by either hoping for Blue Essence when you crack open a capsule or disenchanting your Champion Shards!

– Honor Capsules and Honor Orbs –

For context, we’ll briefly explain how Honor works in League of Legends. Our guide on how to increase Honor has more detail if you’re interested in the nitty-gritty details.

• After a game ends each player is given 40 seconds to recognise one other friendly player in one of three categories: Stayed Cool, Great Shotcalling, GG.
• They each correspond to “Relaxed, Tilt Proof”, “Leadership, Strategy” and “Team player, Friendly” respectively.
• Play matchmade games, earn Honor and you’ll start climbing Honor ranks.

So, if you’re an honorable player, you’ll start levelling your Honor ranking. This in turn leads to some new rewards which play a part in earning Blue Essence.

• Honor Capsules: Reach Honor levels, 3, 4 and 5. They contain Key Fragments, Ward Skins, Emotes, Champion Shards, and Honor exclusive skins.
• Honor Orbs: Reach Honor checkpoints at level 3, 4 and 5. These contain Key Fragments and Champion Shards.

So again, you can go ahead and disenchant any Champion Shards you’ve earned from Honor Capsules and Orbs to bulk out your Blue Essence count.

– Missions –

Missions reward players for completing certain objectives in matchmade games and many of them are event specific.

They vary in difficulty, but it’s the usual Quest stuff – “Win a match” or “Play X matches”.

Not all Missions reward Blue Essence but some will!

– Hextech Chests and Key Fragments –

Players earn a chest whenever they or a teammate earns an S rank in a match with a Champion that they own.

Here’s what Blue Essence related items they have a chance of dropping:

• 1820 RP or less Champion Skin Shard or Ultimate Permanent
• 4800+ Blue Essence Champion Shard
• Another chance of receiving both a Hextech Chest and Key

In order to crack open a Hextech Chest, you’ll need to get Key Fragments and convert them into Hextech Keys.

You’ll earn Key Fragments if you’re an honorable player, but they’ll be distributed randomly, so don’t expect to earn them all the time. Once you’ve gathered 3, you can combine them to form a Hextech Key which can then be used to unlock a Hextech Chest.

Blue Essence Tips

We’ve put together a few tips which’ll save you Blue Essence when building your Champion pool as well as ways to earn it a bit faster than usual.

• If you’re aiming to expand your champ pool, it’s far more cost effective to invest in your Champion Shards to unlock new Champions permanently instead of buying them directly from the store with your Blue Essence.
• The quickest way to get Blue Essence fast is to disenchant any Champion Shards you earn.
• Honestly, we can’t really recommend a great deal of farming tips as the best way is just to play the game to best of your ability – and often. This way you’ll level up faster, get more Honor and in turn you’ll start getting the chests, capsules and shards you need to get that Blue Essence.
• You can buy XP Boosts with RP in the Store. This’ll give you a helping hand when it comes to levelling up.

That wraps up our guide to getting more Blue Essence in League of Legends. If you think we’ve missed a trick, let us know in the comments and we’ll add it in with credit in the next update!