League of Legends
Advanced Mechanics
The Skills Nobody Teaches YouChampion mastery isn't really about knowing what your abilities do. It's about the small execution habits that sit underneath every champion in the game, and almost none of them are explained anywhere in the client. Two players on the same champion with the same items can trade completely differently because one of them resets their attacks and the other doesn't.
Here are the mechanics worth drilling, roughly in the order they'll pay off. Each one includes what it is, why it matters, and a link to the full breakdown where we've written one.
How to practise these: the Practice Tool, not ranked. Every mechanic below is a motor habit, and motor habits form through repetition against a target dummy far faster than through occasional accidents in a real game. Ten focused minutes beats ten games of hoping it clicks.
Attacking Better
Most of the damage you're leaving on the table is here, in how you use basic attacks rather than abilities.
Auto-Attack ResettingMedium
After a basic attack lands, your champion spends time in a wind-down animation that does nothing. Certain abilities cancel that wind-down and immediately allow another attack, so you land two attacks in roughly the time one would normally take.
This is the single biggest source of hidden burst in the game. A trade that looks even on paper isn't, if one player is resetting and the other is standing still watching an animation finish.
Attack-Move and Orb WalkingMedium
Orb walking, sometimes called kiting, means attacking and then immediately moving during the wind-down, so you're always either dealing damage or repositioning and never just standing there. Done properly it lets a ranged champion fight a melee one indefinitely without ever being reached.
The key is binding attack-move to a single key rather than right-clicking each target. Right-clicking makes you walk into an enemy when you misclick the ground; attack-move never does, and it automatically targets whatever is closest. Turn on "Attack Move on Cursor" and bind it somewhere your hand actually rests. This one keybind change does more for a marksman than any amount of mechanical practice on the old default.
Auto-Attack Range SpacingHard
Every champion has an attack range, and the edge of it is where lane trades are won. Standing at maximum range means you can attack while the shorter-ranged opponent can't answer, and it means you're already as far from their engage as you can be.
The hard part is that range is measured from edge to edge of the two champions' hitboxes, not centre to centre, so a big champion is effectively easier to hit than a small one at the same apparent distance.
Animation CancellingHard
Related to attack resetting but broader. Many abilities have a recovery period after their effect has already happened, and that recovery can often be interrupted by a move command, another ability, or a Flash without losing any of the effect.
The effect fires on cast; the animation is just the game showing you it happened. Learning where that boundary sits on your own champion is most of what separates a champion's average player from its best one, and it's entirely champion-specific, so it has to be drilled per champion rather than learned once.
Movement and Defence
Mechanics that keep you alive, which is worth more than damage in almost every situation.
Extending Flash Over LedgesMedium
Flash has a fixed range, but terrain doesn't care about your intentions. Flashing at a wall places you on the far side if the wall is thin enough, which turns a 400 unit blink into an escape route no pursuer can follow directly.
Learning which walls on Summoner's Rift are thin enough is pure map knowledge, and it converts a lot of deaths into escapes.
Blocking Dash DamageHard
Some dashes and charges stop when they collide with a champion, and their damage applies to whoever they hit rather than to the intended target. That means a support standing in the right place absorbs an engage aimed at their carry, and the carry takes nothing at all.
It's one of the least visible ways a good support wins a fight, because on the scoreboard it looks like nothing happened.
Input BufferingEasy
The game accepts your next command slightly before your current action finishes, and queues it. That means you don't have to wait for an animation to end before pressing the next button, and trying to time it perfectly by eye actually makes you slower.
Press the next input early and let the game sort it out. This is the cheapest reaction speed you will ever gain.
Setup and Settings
Things you configure once, outside a game, that pay off in every game afterwards.
SmartcastingEasy
Smartcast fires an ability at your cursor the moment you press the key, skipping the click-to-confirm step entirely. It's strictly faster, and the indicator setting gives you the range preview without giving up the speed.
Nearly every high level player smartcasts everything. If you're still click-casting, this is the highest value change on this page and it takes thirty seconds.
Hotkeys and KeybindingsEasy
The defaults were designed to be unintimidating, not to be good. Self-cast keys, quick-cast with indicators, item hotkeys you can reach without moving your hand, and a sensible attack-move bind all remove small delays that add up across a whole game.
Double Ward Gold on SweeperMedium
A genuinely obscure interaction around how ward clearing pays out, and one most players have never heard of despite it being free gold for doing something they should already be doing.
Where to Go Next
Mechanics decide fights you're already in. What decides whether you're in the right fight at all is macro, and that vocabulary lives in the League of Legends Terms Glossary. For the laning fundamentals these mechanics sit on top of, start with Basic Laning Mechanics and Early Game Autoattacking.
Everything else on the site is indexed on the site map.
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