League of Legends is about skill, precision and strategy. It also requires excellent hand-eye coordination with your mouse, smart use of keyboard and settings that you ought to control to ensure better in-game play. Modifying various aspects of the game’s settings will lead to an enhanced playing experience.
Image Credit: Riot Games
The Best Mouse Settings for League of Legends
Unlike Counter Strike, League of Legends isn’t a shooter. Yet, precision is among its biggest factors, because it helps manage your creep score. To be able to accurately aim your abilities, you need to find a balance in sensitivity levels of your mouse, which is still higher than what professionals set it to for shooter games.
Mouse settings depend on several external factors – not least the brand of mouse. A brand that works for you is vital because you need to be comfortable in dodging enemies and avoiding their skills. Picking a bad mouse puts you at a disadvantage against the opponents straightaway.
Most professionals set their median mouse sensitivity to 50, which is mostly a default value. This is also mostly seen as a good starting point for amateurs. This is subjective and totally dependent on a player’s comfort factor, which can only be achieved by trial and error.
What works for one may not necessarily work for the other, so find a setting that works for you. It will help to have your mouse camera move speed around the same level as your mouse speed for the sake of consistency. Most professionals use the same value for the mouse sensitivity and cam sensitivity.
Most gaming mice come with an in-built setting of 1600 DPI (dots per inch). It’s a measure of how sensitive your mouse is. The higher the DPI, the faster the mouse movement, meaning the larger distance it will cover on the screen with smaller moves. This will help you operate faster. That said, it can also make it harder to be precise, a very important prerequisite for League of Legends. So, it is important for players to develop a comfort factor with the settings they choose first.
This may be a no-brainer, but if ever there’s a dilemma between choosing a wireless or a wired mouse, opt for the wireless one for it will ensure no added hassles of dealing with tangling cables. Wireless mice can be either optical or laser. Laser mice are most common due to smoothness of operations and because they can work on any surface. However, in gaming, its use could be a bit iffy because the sensor can detect the most minute movement, which could create an obstacle. This is why most gamers use a mouse with optical sensors for better accuracy.
Beyond champion movement, your mouse will have a massive influence on your abilities and the direction they take. This is why getting the mouse settings for League of Legends right is non-negotiable.
DPI sorted. What about mouse speed?
A mouse speed between 20-25 is a good starting point, along with a DPI of 1600. What this mouse speed will do is allow you to adjust to the speed of play without making precision errors. It will also give you time to adjust to the high DPI. The lesser the mouse speed, the more control to begin with. It helps safe play.
It will also help to turn off mouse acceleration because it will reduce your control over the mouse, and consequently your actions in-game. It’s important to turn off mouse acceleration because mouse speed tends to increase and decrease at random during gameplay. The dwindling acceleration or mouse speed during gameplay results in plenty of inaccuracy, which you can avoid by switching off mouse acceleration. This may make it tough initially, but practice can make one perfect.
Then of course, set the camera speed of both your keyboard and mouse at an optimum level. For your mouse, you can look to set your camera movement speed between 15-20. For the keyboard – which we will get to detail in a bit – this value should be around 50-60.
It is important to be careful as you execute moves. If you don’t, you could send attacks in the wrong direction. So spend enough time adjusting to your mouse, which is your major weapon. Over time and with optimised settings, you should become more proficient.
Best Keyboard Settings for League of Legends
It is important to identify your hotkeys quickly. One way of doing that is by ensuring all your hotkeys are around each other and within reach. A fraction of a second is enough to be the difference between landing a kill and being killed, so choose your keys carefully. To ensure this, use Quick Cast All. This means you will make one less click before you use an ability, which saves you precious time. This has a downside – you can’t see the range of your spells, but as your proficiency with the game increases and improves, you will be acquainted with the spells anyway, so it shouldn’t be that much of a hindrance.
Quick Casting
This is the process where you cast your champion abilities. To do this, just press the key assigned and point with the mouse. You need to know your abilities well, though, because you can’t speedily throw skills if you aren’t familiar with them. Understanding the abilities of the champions you play is key. To change the settings, access the menu with options. From there, find the hotkeys, and you will also see normal and quick casting. Move in to quick cast, enter the keys you want to set up for your abilities and press ‘OK’. You should be good to go.
Self Cast
This is done by pressing alt and a key you have input in the settings. This is a method to showcase your abilities in team fights. The purpose of this setting is to make it easy for team activities. If you’re in the midst of a brawl, it’s likely you could click on an enemy or another ally and fail, instead of pressing on your champion.
Using self cast avoids this problem. To add a key to self cast, go to settings, find hotkeys, self-cast and choose the options available to you. Relocate the key to it and you’re ready.
Best Resolution and Refresh Rate
League of Legends is 12 years old, and is made to perform on a wide variety of PCs and desktops to begin with, so it’s available across a wide range of functions and configurations. Most professionals play at a resolution of 1920×1080. You can, of course, choose a higher resolution, but that could only end up adding extra strain on your PC.
In multiplayer online battle arena games, refresh rate isn’t such a big consideration as it is in shooting games, so don’t fret over higher refresh rates. It can’t be denied that the game will look smoother at 144 frames per second and upwards, so if you have the resources to opt in for a system with these configurations, this is an ideal refresh rate to set your benchmark on.
Best Video Settings
Try and enable low spec mode – which you will find under settings in LoL – if you struggle with frame drops or performance. This will help reduce the amount of resources your client uses and will boost performance considerably. Disabling screen shake is another excellent idea; it won’t affect performance.
Best Interface Settings
The default interface setting in LoL can make some elements large and others too small. A small HUD, chat and cursor scale will allow you to see more of the fight. However, ensure your cursor isn’t too small, for it could become tough to see when fights become intense.
Don’t go too low with these elements. That said, much of this is subjective. What you can or should do is increase the size of the minimap, which provides crucial pieces of information.
Best Audio Settings
Reviews are mixed regarding the importance of audio in LoL. For some, it’s non-negotiable. For others, it isn’t even a consideration. However, for the sake of consistency, there are some audio settings and tweaks that you could make, based on the amount you chat and on how you utilize the in-game audio.
Set your master volume to 75 and music volume to 0. Announcer volume at 85, voice volume at 75. Reduce your ambiance volume to 25 and have your pings volume at 100 to help react quickly to in-game directions. Minimizing sound effects and ambiance helps avoid distractions.
