Welcome to ModLegends guide on the absolute best settings and hotkeys everyone need to be using in Season 14. We won't be wasting your time by going over every single setting in the game. Instead, after many years of playing with the best players in the game, we've distilled down the absolute must-use settings and hotkeys. So, let's get right into it.
Clamp Casting
Starting us off, there's a brand new setting Riot has added that has been 14 years in the making, and it changes everything. Have you ever tried to flash as Annie and nothing happens for a second until you finally drop Tibbers? Yeah, you weren't lagging for leagues and an entire lifetime. Skill shots operated in one of two ways. If it was a projectile known as a line missile such as Ezreal's Q, then even when your cursor was far away from the spell's max range upon casting it, it would instantly fire. Compare this to a spell like Annie's ultimate. This is not a line missile, and so if we cast it outside of its range, the game will force Annie to walk forward until she's in range and then it fires. Here's the thing: not every Champion was coded this way. For example, Caden's ultimate operates the exact same way as Annie's, yet if we cast it outside of its range, it will instantly go off. This is where the new setting comes in.
Go to options, then the game tab. Scroll down, and you'll see "clamp cast Target location within max range." Turn this on, and now when you ult as Annie outside of your max range, it will instantly fire. This can make a lot of Champions easier to play, such as Karthus with his Q and W, and Brand with his W.
Quick Cast & Normal Cast
And speaking of comboing fast, you absolutely need to be using a specific quick cast setup on your abilities. Normal casting is when you press an ability, your range indicator comes up, and then you press left click to cast it. This is very slow. Compare that to quick casting. It's when you press an ability, and it will instantly cast without any indicators appearing. This is fast. We've tested this, and on average, quick casting will make you cast abilities 33% faster than normal. So, go to settings, press that quick cast all button, and you're good to go. Well, not so fast. Here's the specific setup that pros use.
Scroll down, open up abilities and Summoner spells dropdown. Then, where it says normal cast, rebind everything to Shift plus the ability. So, Shift Q, Shift W, Shift E, Shift R. Now, when you press Shift plus the ability, it will bring up the range indicator for it like before. This is essential to do because even though 90% of the time you need to be quick casting your abilities for the speed advantage, the other 10% of the time, you really do need the range indicator. Some very common examples are when you're wave clearing, you often want to use Shift plus your wave clear ability to make sure it hits the entire wave. Another one is when you're using a spell with very high range. Hitting Shift plus the ability will let you know the max range, so you know exactly when you're close enough to cast it.
Also, don't forget you need to do this on your ward hotkeys as well. You want them to be quick casted by default but create a Shift hotkey for their normal cast. There are tons of warding spots you simply can't do without the normal cast indicator, so make sure that you have a normal cast hotkey. And speaking of making things faster, if you want to speed up your rank climb, well then ModLegends is perfect for you.
Attack Moving
To get the rank you've always wanted. Alright, so next up, let's teach you the settings you need to attack move like a pro. Now, many players already know how to attack move, which is to press A and then click on the ground near your target. This helps to auto-attack opponents without having to be perfectly accurate with your mouse. It also avoids the super common problem of misclicking and walking into an opponent when you really meant to attack them. It's also necessary for face-checking brushes to prevent you from getting brush duped by attack moving into the brush. As soon as you see the enemy, you'll instantly auto-attack them without having to actually click on them.
The problem is, by default, this will attack the nearest target in the direction moving towards, so if literally anything is in front of you, good luck ever hitting the target you want. This is why you need to go to your settings, then game, and turn on "Attack Move on Cursor." This will change your attack move, so now instead of attacking the closest target to your champion, it attacks the closest target to your cursor. This allows you to use attack move just like the pros with precision instead of attacking the nearest enemy, which causes countless problems.
You also need to go to your settings and then interface tab and enable "Show Attack Range." This way, every time you do press A, a circle will appear around your champion that represents your max auto-attack range. This will make it super easy to always stay at your maximum distance, giving you crazy good kiting. And before you think this is some sort of training wheel setting only noobs use, literally the best pros in the world have this turned on. For example, Ruler using it, who's considered the best pro ADC carry in the entire world.
Target Champions Only
And speaking of attacking champions, the next setting is all about making sure you do exactly that. Not accidentally auto attack a minion or tower instead completely embarrassing yourself, the "Target Champions Only" hotkey will make it so that your auto attacks can only hit enemy Champions. You can see how it's impossible for me to right-click any minion when I'm holding it down. Of course, this is great at making sure you execute tower dives cleanly or win fights in lane when the enemy is standing in a giant wave, but it's really more than that. Without knowing this hotkey, you'll never be able to maneuver into jungle camps without aggroing them, setting up a tower dive on mid lane has never been easier when you can walk right into the Raptors and dash over the wall. Not to mention, there are a ton of Champions that need specific positioning to jump walls with their abilities like Yasuo or even getting the right angle as Jayce to knock a camp over a wall to then jump onto it. The list goes on.
To set this up, go to your settings hotkeys, scroll down abilities and Summoner spells, and create a keybind for "Target Champions Only." Some great choices for this are Z,X, C, and V, as typically those don't have anything important on it. T or G are good, the tilde key to the left of number one is good, or if you have buttons on the side of your mouse, those can work great too. Now, when you hold down the keybind, your autos will only attack Champions. There is one downside to this though. It's that it can be difficult to hold this key down while also trying to cast all of your abilities. Thankfully, there's a solution to this. Go to your settings, game, then enable "Treat Target Champions Only as a toggle." Now, you'll only have to press the hotkey once. It will toggle the setting on and you'll only attack Champions, and press it again to toggle it off.
Stop Command
Now, from attacking, let's discuss the opposite: the stop command. By default, it's bound to S, and we recommend keeping it that way. Of course, most players understand that the skill in last-hitting minions is all about timing your attack to be the final hit to kill the minion in order to collect the gold. What players don't realize, though, is that since your auto-attack is a projectile, the further away you are from a minion, the harder it's going to be to time that last hit because of the increased distance your projectile has to travel. This is where the stop command comes in.
What you want to do is move up right next to a minion, press the stop command, then once it's ready to last-hit, just right-click. If you try it out yourself, you'll see just how much easier this will make last-hitting. Now, of course, we're not saying just use this all lane; you'll be standing still and an easy target for enemy skill shots. However, this is super useful in any situation where you have lane control. For example, a very common scenario is during slow pushes. Usually, you'll have a big minion wave built up, so the enemy is scared to fight you. At the same time, with so many minions of your own, they are just machine-gunning down enemy minions, making it super hard to time your last hits. These are the kinds of situations where you want to use the stop command.
Also, any Champion that has an empowered auto-attack spell can actually spam the stop command and right-click over and over again, which usually both makes a super annoying sound and looks really buggy, which is cool, I guess. And by the way, if you're someone who struggles with farming and last-hitting minions, then I highly recommend taking our Mastering Minions course on CSing that you can only find on our website. Our subscribers have been raving about how much this has helped them improve with perfect five-star ratings. I highly recommend checking it out.
F Key Cycling
Alright, next up we have F-key cycling. If you've watched any pro player or a challenger stream, you'll notice them quickly cycle their camera across their teammates to get insane map vision super fast. Without F-key cycling, you'll have to first look at the minimap, then identify where your teammates actually are, then move your cursor very accurately to click on them, and if at any point you miss slightly, you'll have to take the time to adjust the camera. In the end, it's just very inefficient.
This is why there's a secret to setting this up like the pros. Go to your settings, hotkeys, and camera control. Rebind select All 1, 2, 3, and 4 to the respective F-keys. You have to do this because by default, F1 will be bound to yourself, which is what you already want to use your space bar for. Now, here's the thing: the F-keys on your keyboard are notoriously awkward and difficult to hit. A lot of players just find them uncomfortable, especially if they have smaller hands.
So, if you're someone with this problem, we highly recommend trying out rebinding them to Z, X, C, and V. The nice thing about this is that if you rest your pinky finger on your shift key like most players do, it becomes really easy to just slide your pinky over to the Z key, with the rest of your fingers on X, C, and V, and then just hit them in sequence with your thumb, hitting space bar at the end to return to yourself. It also lets you do this really OP trick with Zerath where if Aain is on your team and als the enemy, you can hold his Ally hotkey and actually spam your alt, and it's literally an Aimbot. So, that's pretty cool.
Level Up Abilities
Our next setting is literally one of the most OP tactics: level power spikes, specifically levels 2, 3, and 6. These are unique points in the game where you have a massive advantage over the opponent because you'll have an entire extra spell over them. This is why if you click on your abilities to level them up, you need to stop doing it. Instead, you need to use Control plus the ability.
In what world could you do something like this? Where you EQ through a minion, kill it to spike level six, and before your EQ finishes, you've leveled up your ult to use it on the opponent? There are just countless examples where you'll have to level up an ability extremely fast in order to get the solo kill off of these level spikes.
And if you think scenarios like this will never happen to you, well, there's actually a fairly hidden mechanic only pros know about. If you level up an ability while it's still in the air, you can actually increase the damage while reducing its mana cost.
Let me show you how it works. Here, Viktor has one point in his E ability, and so it costs 70 mana. You can see how it does 74 damage. Now, we've leveled up, but we don't immediately level up our E. Instead, we wait to cast it, then level it up mid-air. Notice how despite the cost changing to 80 mana, we already paid the previous 70 mana when we casted it, so we essentially saved 10 in the meantime. Once the E hits, it does 114 damage, 40 more than before. Basically, you're using the mana cost of a lower-level ability while you get the damage from the higher-cost ability.
FPS & Refresh Rate
Let's move on to some specific video settings that will help give you a competitive advantage. We're going to keep this short and sweet. All you need to know is that, in general, the higher your FPS, the more of an advantage it is. This is because with higher frames per second, the more frequent the game is updating. This means that incoming skill shots are easier for you to dodge as you're both seeing it being cast earlier and getting a more accurate picture of where it is currently in the air.
However, this is only one half of the picture. You're also impacted by what's known as your monitor's refresh rate. A monitor's refresh rate determines how often your monitor will update per second. So just like FPS, the higher the monitor refresh rate, the better, as you'll see things on your screen earlier.
To check your monitor's refresh rate, simply right-click your desktop, click "Display settings," scroll down, and select "Advanced display settings." Then click "Display adapter properties for Display 1." Click the "Monitor" tab, and you'll see the screen refresh rate drop-down. You want to make sure you select the highest refresh rate available to you.
Now, after you've done this, go in-game and make sure you disable Vsync. Vsync is notorious for causing input lag, which just means it will cause a delay when you input commands, making you react slower. It also matches your FPS to your monitor's refresh rate, which for most people will actually cause you to have lower FPS.
Now, League is very weird. It's common that uncapping your FPS will cause the game to actually stutter. So if that's the case for you, cap it at the highest number that gives you stable FPS. For most players, this is going to be 240.
Visual Clarity
Now, let's discuss the importance of visual clarity. For some settings, it's actually better to take a minor hit to your FPS in order to make things a lot easier to see.
Let's start with effects quality. If we set it to very low, Lux's Q will look like this. Compare that to when we set it to very high, it becomes far easier to see as it becomes significantly brighter. If setting effects quality to very high is too taxing on your computer, then we recommend at least setting it to medium, as this will be a good boost to your visual clarity.
Next, let's talk about character quality. Here, Lux is set to very low character quality, and you can see she looks very blurry. Compare this to when we set it to very high, she looks a lot crisper. This setting is especially noticeable on neutral monsters like Rift Herald. Again, we recommend setting this to at least medium, as this is where you'll get the biggest boost to visual clarity with minimal FPS impact.
Moving on to environment quality, this will actually have the biggest impact on how your game looks. Setting this to very low makes everything incredibly blurry, and we recommend staying away from it. The weird thing, though, is that there's almost no difference between setting it to low or medium, and the same thing with high versus very high. So either set this to low or high depending on how good your computer is.
Finally, we have shadow quality. This will put shadows underneath all champions, monsters, and minions. However, if you turn this on, it absolutely tanks your FPS and provides no competitive advantage, so we definitely recommend turning it off.
Another important setting for both boosting your FPS and getting better visual clarity is hiding eye candy. If you don't turn this on, your computer will render a lot of additional unnecessary details throughout Summoner's Rift. Basically, you'll want to turn this off to get an FPS boost while having no downsides.
One final setting that gives you a massive boost to visual clarity is enabling color blind mode. Yes, even if you can see the full color spectrum. Take Brand's W as an example. Look at how much easier it is to spot when you turn on color blind mode. This is why we recommend that everyone turns this on.
Sound Settings
Speaking of clarity, most people don't know that there have been countless studies done to prove that your auditory reaction time is actually faster than your visual reaction time. This means your brain will recognize hearing something like a Lux Bind being cast before actually seeing it. This is why your sound settings are actually more important than most players realize.
Optimizing them is simple. You'll want to disable music, voice, and ambience volume. All three of these provide no competitive advantage and will only serve to muddy important sound effects. Additionally, consider lowering your pings and announcer volume a bit lower than your sound effects volume. This way, they don't drown out key sound cues.
Move Camera on Revive
For the next setting, have you ever been dead waiting to teleport into a fight, then as soon as you respawn, your camera just jumps back to you and it's disorienting? Yeah, this is because of a setting called "move camera on revive," and we highly recommend disabling this. This way, you can actually land that sick Ezreal ultimate on a recalling enemy when you respawn.
Interface Settings
Alright, now let's move on to optimizing your interface options. By default, your HUD scale will be maxed out. This actually prevents you from seeing things below you, such as incoming jungle ganks. This is why you should go to settings, then interface, and drop your HUD scale to zero. This way, you can see and react to things around you a lot more.
Next up is the mini-map. By default, the game sets it to 33, which is way too small. No top player ever keeps this on default. However, the next common mistake players make is cranking it up super high. This makes the map way too big and actually ironically will block your vision, giving you worse map awareness. This is why it's recommended to put it anywhere between 50 to 65. This is the most common size range the best players in the world use.
Continue scrolling down within interface, and you'll see the "show loss of control UI" setting. You absolutely need to have this enabled. It creates a bar above Champions that will count down how long crowd control will last. It makes it so you can perfectly time your own crowd control with an ally, so you can chain CC enemies.
And below that, you have "show names above health bar." We recommend you swap this to Champion names. With how many different Champions and skins Riot releases, it's incredibly difficult to recognize what Champion is actually on your screen. This way, regardless of what skin an enemy is using, you know exactly what Champion it is and can react accordingly.
And right below that, you have "Champion highlight on camera Center," which you want enabled. This will put a circle and an arrow pointing down to you whenever you press space bar to jump back to yourself. It's extremely helpful at keeping track of where you are on the screen during chaotic team fights.
Scroll down a bit more, and then you see "enable line missile display." If you have it disabled, all you get is a cursor and a circle around you, which makes hitting your skill shots way harder. This is why it's mandatory to have it enabled in order to properly aim skill shots.
And then right below that, you have "show spell cost." You always want this on, as there's nothing worse than using your flash and ult to all-in someone, only to realize you don't have enough Mana to cast the rest of your abilities. So you always want this on to make sure you have the Mana needed to full combo opponents.
Mute Emotes & Eternals & Pings
Riot has added a lot of improvements to League over the years, but we're not going to lie to you, things like emotes, eternals, and offscreen pings can end up blocking a ton of your screen and just be distracting. This is why we recommend you disable the show offscreen pings. They do more harm than good, and if your teammates are pinging well, you can and should be checking the mini-map instead.
After doing this, scroll down and under emotes, you want to turn off emote bubble display, turn emote size small, and mute enemy emotes. This gets rid of as many distracting emote animations as possible.
And finally, continue scrolling, and under eternals, milestone display, change it to none. This will remove those Eternal pop-ups from the game while you play.
Chat Settings
To optimize your chat settings, it's very important to enable timestamps. This will make it so anything pinged or typed will leave timestamps next to them. This is how all the best players in the world do things like time Summoner spells. If an enemy uses flash or teleport, you can just ping it. Then, the next time you have nothing to do, like when you're walking back to lane, you can bring up your chat, check when the ping happened, and add the cooldown to it to time when it comes back up.
There are very specific hotkeys pros use to keep track of timers in-game. So, next time you type out an enemy timer in chat, before you hit enter, press Ctrl+C, then Ctrl+A, then Ctrl+C again. Now, you can press Ctrl+V whenever you want to paste that to remind yourself when it's coming back up. You then want to build on this, where if another Summoner spell is used, you press Ctrl+V, then Spacebar, then type the new cooldown, and then Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C again to copy it.
You then want to update this throughout the entire game by using specific Ctrl+Shift and arrow key hotkeys. Holding down Ctrl while tapping an arrow key actually lets you skip entire words. So, for example, if you needed to remove the first timer, you could hold Ctrl then tap the left arrow until you're at the end of what you want to remove. From there, hold Ctrl+Shift and then tap the left arrow until you've selected everything you want to delete. Press delete, then Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C again to copy the updated timers. Once you build this habit, it's an absolute game-changer since you can literally track the entire enemy team Summoner spell cooldowns throughout the entire game.
Bonus Setting
Finally, as always, we have a bonus setting for you. We all know how toxic League can be, and getting flamed can easily tilt you, causing you to not only play worse but just not want to play. To help with this, go to Settings > Interface and change chat visibility to "Same Team." There's no benefit to having all chat enabled as the enemy team can only serve to tilt you.
Now, I know what you're thinking, "Well, no, that's not true, it's actually my teammates typing that will tilt me." Well, if that's the case, you can simply change it to "Pre-made Only." This prevents you from seeing anyone typing besides who's in your party. While you'll still be able to see their pings, the potential issue or benefit, depending on what kind of player you are, is that you won't be able to type either.
This is why we recommend the following setup: Change chat visibility to "Same Team," then every time you enter a new game, type "/mute all." Then, after you do that, follow it up with "/mute pings all." This will actually cause you to unmute everyone's pings while keeping their text muted, letting you still type and hear your teammates' pings while not having to see what they type.
Conclusion
And now you know the most important settings and hotkeys you need to be using in League of Legends. If you're feeling stuck and you just can't rank up no matter how hard you try, then ModLegends is the solution you've been looking for. Alright, that will wrap things up. We here at ModLegends want to thank you for watching, and we'll catch you in the next one.
FAQs
How often should I review and adjust my settings?
It's important to periodically review and adjust your settings to stay competitive and adapt to changes in the game meta. As new features and optimizations are introduced, staying proactive in optimizing your settings ensures that you remain at the top of your game.
Are there any additional resources available for further optimization and improvement?
Yes, there are numerous resources available, including guides, tutorials, and community forums, where players can share tips, strategies, and insights for optimizing their settings and improving their gameplay. Explore these resources to continue refining your skills and mastering the game.
Why are settings and hotkeys important in League of Legends?
Settings and hotkeys play a crucial role in maximizing efficiency and precision during gameplay. By optimizing these aspects, players can enhance their mechanical skill and strategic decision-making, leading to improved performance on the Rift.
How can I customize my settings to suit my playstyle?
Customizing settings and hotkeys allows players to tailor their in-game experience to their individual preferences and playstyles. Experiment with different configurations to find what works best for you and enhances your overall performance.
What are some common mistakes players make when configuring their settings?
Common mistakes include overlooking key settings, such as quick cast configurations and interface adjustments, and failing to optimize for visual clarity and responsiveness. By avoiding these pitfalls and staying informed, players can maximize their potential on the battlefield.