LoL Settings Guide: The Options Worth Changing Before Your Next Game

Ten settings worth changing before your next game, from quick cast with indicator down to the health bar text almost nobody switches. None of them require practice, and two of them change every teamfight you play.

League of Legends Guide

Settings Worth Changing

Before Your Next Game

Almost nobody opens the settings menu after their first week, so most players are still using defaults chosen for somebody else's screen and somebody else's hands.

These are the ones that pay for themselves immediately, in rough order of how much they change.

Casting Attacking Reading a Fight The Shop Display

Quick cast with indicator, and clamping

Quick cast with indicator is the big one. It shows the range or shape of an ability while the key is held and fires it when you release, so you get the aiming information of normal cast with the speed of quick cast. If you change one thing on this page, it's this.

Turning it on for everything is one checkbox rather than a per-spell chore: Replace Quick Cast with Quick Cast with Indicator in the quickbind UI switches every spell you already had on quick cast over in one go. Switch it that way before you sit there flipping four buttons per champion.

Clamp cast target location within max range has a long name and a simple idea: aiming past an ability's maximum range casts it at maximum range instead of failing to cast at all. Without it an overreach is a dead input (the worst possible outcome at the moment you needed something to happen). It matters most for long-range champions and for anyone whose hands get ahead of their aim when a fight starts.

Attack move on cursor, and target champions only

Attack move on cursor decides whether an attack-move command targets whatever is nearest your champion or whatever is nearest your cursor. Cursor is the setting that makes kiting feel like aiming rather than hoping, because you choose the target instead of taking the nearest minion.

Target champions only is a key that already exists and that plenty of players have never found. By default you hold it (you can set it to toggle instead). Attacking the wrong thing in a fight under your own turret is one of the most common ways a good position becomes a death, and this is the fix. Learn the key first, then decide whether you want to hold or flip it.

Two settings that make fights readable

Show Loss of Control UI puts an indicator over a health bar when that champion is stunned, rooted, feared or otherwise unable to act. There's a companion switch, screen flash on loss of control, which throws a white vignette around your own screen when it happens to you. It sounds cosmetic and isn't: half the decisions in a fight come down to whether the person you're looking at can respond, and reading that off an icon is far faster than inferring it from an animation.

Names above health bars can show the player name, the champion name, or nothing. Champion name is the useful option, and for some reason hardly anybody switches to it. In a messy fight what you need is which character it is, and a player name is a string you have to translate under pressure.

Item component purchasing

This controls whether clicking an item buys the finished thing or buys whatever parts of it you can currently afford. Turning it on means you never again stand in the fountain doing arithmetic about which component to take with the gold you have.

It's a small change that removes a real source of wasted seconds, and a surprising number of players have never touched it.

Scale, minimap and movement prediction

Minimap scale is bigger than the default for most people once they've tried it. The map is where the information is, and a larger one means fewer misread pings. Granted, it eats screen space in the corner you fight in, so push it up gradually rather than dragging it to maximum and hating it for a week.

HUD and shop scale are pure preference, and the only wrong answer is never having looked. The bar across the bottom is covering part of the ground you're standing on.

Movement prediction is the one genuinely situational setting here. On a good connection you'll never notice it; on a bad one it's the difference between a playable game and a champion who arrives somewhere you didn't ask for. If your movement stutters and rubber bands, go find this switch before blaming your mouse.

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The short version

Quick cast with indicator, attack move on cursor, champion names over health bars, and loss of control indicators. Four changes, no practice required, and they improve every game you play afterward.

For the mechanics those settings are helping you with, our auto attack guide covers attack-move and windup, and our crowd control guide covers what those loss-of-control icons are telling you.