There’s a whole range of factors that can determine whether you gain or lose LP in League. Some factors are pretty obvious, like learning how to last-hit, mastering a champion’s kit, and not turret diving a level 6 Kayle.
Others, however, are often overlooked. One of the most forgotten about factors? Your in-game client settings. An optimal configuration can help prevent ping spikes, strengthen your mechanics, boost your macro awareness, and even lessen tilt.
That’s why we’ve crafted an in-depth guide on the best client settings in League. We’ll cover how to optimize each option, and more importantly, the gamechanging benefits they provide.
Best Video Settings to Keep Your Ping Low and FPS High
Maxed-out graphics might make the game look great, but if your device can’t handle the specs? Your gaming experience is sure to take a hit. Opting for the video settings below will ensure nothing can ruin your perfectly-timed plays, whether stuttering, lag spikes, or FPS drops.
- Resolution: The resolution should match or be slightly lower than your monitor’s native resolution to prevent performance issues. A low resolution will boost your FPS as it’ll allow your GPU to process the visual information a lot quicker, though it can also affect image quality and sharpness. The sweet spot in terms of resolution is 1920 x 1080.
- Hide eye candy: Eye candy is League’s term for ambient and critter effects. These visuals are solely for aesthetic purposes and won’t impact gameplay, so you can switch this setting on to reduce the load.
- Screenshake: When activated, this setting causes your screen to physically shake during combat. While it provides immersion, we advise disabling this setting. It tends to cause ping spikes on low-end devices and can also be pretty distracting.
- Graphics performance: Set your graphics performance to “very low” (increased performance), and ensure all the individual quality settings, like character and effects, are also set to very low. While this takes the visuals down a notch, it will significantly boost your FPS.
- Frame Rate Cap: Keep the frame rate at 60 FPS or 144 FPS, depending on your PC’s refresh rate. Avoid the uncapped option — it isn’t well-optimized in League and often triggers lag spikes.
- Anti-aliasing: This setting essentially smooths out visuals and prevents jaggedness. We advise disabling it. It doesn’t make a huge difference when activated, and like many other settings here, it won’t spruce up your gameplay, only the game’s appearance.
- Low spec mode: Don’t forget to activate low spec mode too. Located under the General tab, low spec mode is a configuration option designed to speed up game performance. It automatically disables League’s most intensive effects and animations, including in the client itself.
Best Hotkey and Gameplay Settings: Mastering Mechanics
Last-hitting, kiting, landing your skillshots — there’s a whole load of complex mechanics to master in League if you’re hoping to climb the ranks. Fortunately, there are various settings that can actually assist with mechanics and make the learning process that little bit easier. Level up your gameplay with the following setting changes:
- Quick cast (aka smart cast): When activated, this setting casts an ability based on your mouse positioning, cutting out the time-consuming targeting process. Quick cast is a total gamechanger; it helps you land skillshots faster and drastically speeds up your reaction times. However, this setting does take time to get used to. You need to be familiar with the ability’s hitbox and range, and you shouldn’t use quick cast for every ability. Some, such as Viktor’s death ray, are better suited to normal cast. You can set quick cast as a toggle (and also bind it to specific abilities rather than your entire kit) in the hotkey settings tab.
- Target champions only: Keep losing vital fights because you accidentally click on minions instead of the target? Then you’ll definitely appreciate this setting. It makes it so your cursor can only target champions. So yep, those questionable misclicks will no longer haunt your gameplay (and dreams). You can assign target champions only to a hotkey of your choice, and also make it a toggle by enabling the “treat target champions only as a toggle” option.
- Player attack move: This causes your champion to attack the nearest target to your cursor, even if your cursor isn’t directly on them. It’s a must-have setting for any ADC main; it stops your misclicks from being heavily punished and prevents your champion from accidentally walking toward the target (ideal when kiting).
- Camera lock mode: Locked camera screen is the default setting in League, but it’s extremely restrictive. It limits your field of view, makes it nearly impossible to land long-ranged skillshots, and gets you into the bad habit of focusing on your champion rather than the map. You can set a keybind to toggle between locked and unlocked camera under the “camera control” hotkey tab.
- Camera move speed: This is ultimately down to preference and what you’re accustomed to. Generally though, between 30 and 50 is a good option. If the camera move speed is lower than this, it could slow down your reaction time, but if the camera move speed is higher than 50, you could accidentally zoom past your desired map location.
- Area is warded ping: This ping allows you to tell your teammates that the enemy has vision in the area. Despite being insanely useful, this setting isn’t enabled by default. You can enable it by binding it to a key of your choice — it’s located under the “communication” hotkeys tab. Unlike most of the other settings here, the area is warded ping is designed to improve your macro awareness instead of mechanics. We’ll cover more macro-boosting settings shortly, so stay tuned.
Best Sound Settings to Hear Every Gamechanging Detail
You should be able to easily hear every vital piece of information, including ability usage, the enemy’s movements, and ally pings. Unnecessary, distracting sounds, like music and ambient effects, should be kept low or removed entirely. Here’s our ideal configuration:
- Enable sound: Yes, overall volume 100.
- Enable sound SFX: Yes, overall volume 100.
- Ambient sounds: Disabled.
- Announcer volume: Yes, set to 50.
- Voice volume: Yes, set to 100 (many champions have abilities with distinctive voice lines).
- Game music: Disabled.
- Pings volume: Yes, overall volume 100.
Interface Settings That’ll Boost Your Macro and Combat Tilt
The interface settings allow you to customize what information is readily available within a game, such as health bars, chat timestamps, and spell costs, as well as the actual scale of the HUD and minimap.
Enabling critical game information, while ensuring unnecessary information isn’t polluting your screen, can help boost your macro awareness by tenfold. Some settings, especially those related to communication, can even help combat tilt.
- Hud scale: Scale down the HUD to around 20 to 30. This will provide more area vision and allow your eyes to focus on other more important visual aspects, like the minimap.
- Chat scale: Set to around 60. Ideally, you want the chat to be pretty visible because your allies are likely to ping vital information like upcoming objectives and summoner spell usage. However, if you’re the type to get easily tilted by toxicity? It’s best to just disable the chat (toggle off the show all and allied chat options). While you’ll lose out on some critical information, it can help preserve your mental throughout the match, which is a worthy trade-off in our perspective.
- Minimap scale: Scale this to the max possible size. The larger the minimap is, the easier it’ll be to spot the split seconds where your opponents appear on the map.
- Health and Resource bars: Enable “show health bars” and “show loss of control UI”. The former allows you to keep track of a player’s health, while the latter gives a visual indicator when a player is affected by crowd control. “Show health bar shake,” which shakes the health bar when a player experiences heavy burst damage, should be disabled. It doesn’t provide any critical information and can be extremely distracting, especially in hectic teamfights.
- Show names above healthbar: This setting allows you to customize whether you see a player’s username, champion name, or nothing above their health bar. Switch this setting to “champion name” — it’ll ensure you can still recognize a champion if they’ve got a skin equipped.
- Notifications: Most of these notifications aren’t useful and pretty much just clutter up your screen. So, we recommend disabling these, especially “screen flash on damage” and “show flash on loss of control.”
- Show spell cost: Keep this setting enabled. It reveals each ability’s mana cost, making it easy to keep track of your mana usage throughout the game.
- Show attack range: A must-have setting if you’re not familiar with your champion’s kit — it provides a visual indicator of your attack range.
- Ability cooldown display: Like its name suggests, this setting reveals each ability’s cooldown timer. This setting should be automatically enabled. However, if it isn’t for whatever reason, make sure to enable it and set it to “seconds.”
- Emotes and eternals: Sure, emotes and eternals are fun, but they’re incredibly distracting. They hog up the screen and draw your attention away from the minimap (or lane itself). We advise disabling them both while playing Ranked Solo/Duo. Don’t forget to mute enemy emotes too.
- Show chat timestamps: When activated, the chat will provide a timestamp for every ping or message sent. Definitely keep this enabled — it’s insanely useful when it comes to keeping track of summoner spells or ability cooldowns.
Mastering the League of Legends Client
Optimizing your settings improves your chances of winning your ranked matches before they even begin. However, don’t jump into ranked queue immediately after making the setting changes. Many, like quick cast, attack move on cursor, and unlocked screen, take a lot of time to get used to, and you don’t want your LP to be on the line while you’re figuring out how they work. Good luck!
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