The best LoL settings to climb are the ones that remove the milliseconds between your decision and your champion executing it. Three changes move the win-rate needle more than every other setting combined: Attack Move on Cursor (the Player Practice setting), Quick Cast on All Abilities, and Smart Cast Self for Flash. Bind those, save the config, and your CS, kiting, and Flash engages improve in the next game. Everything else – HUD scale, camera shake, FPS cap, range indicator on mouseover – is comfort tuning that doesn’t change the math.
This is the full settings pass that pros run at every level of every rank from Iron to Challenger: 15+ settings to change, the keybind table that lets your fingers move at the speed your brain decides, and the camera setup that fixes the single most common map-awareness mistake low-elo players don’t even know they’re making.
The three settings that actually move the needle
If you only change three things in the LoL settings menu, change these three. The other dozen recommendations in this article are real and they matter; these three are the ones that turn into LP inside a week.
- Attack Move on Cursor (Player Practice). Open Hotkeys -> Player Practice. Set “Attack Move Click” to A and “Attack Move (Hold)” to a key you don’t use (Shift+A is fine). When you press A, your champion attacks the closest enemy to your cursor, not the closest enemy to your model. Kiting with Vayne, last-hitting at long range with Jinx, dodging skill shots while still hitting the wave – none of these are real without attack-move click. This is the single biggest mechanical upgrade in the entire menu.
- Quick Cast on All Abilities. Open Hotkeys -> Spells & Summoner Spells. Set Quick Cast on Q, W, E, R. The cast triggers on key release at the cursor position. No range-indicator-confirm-click sequence. Your skill shots go off faster, your engage windows are shorter, and your opponents have less reaction time. The price is roughly 3 games of feeling weird if you’ve been on normal cast for years.
- Smart Cast Self for Flash + ground-target summoners. Open Hotkeys -> Spells & Summoner Spells. Set Smart Cast Self for Flash (default F), Heal, Ignite. Flash triggers on yourself when you press F, instead of needing to click yourself first. Combos like Flash+R (Malphite, Amumu, Sett) become single-frame inputs instead of click-Flash-click-R sequences.
The community consensus on these three lives in the r/summonerschool settings thread – the same three changes lead every “what should I change” reply for years. Treat this as the floor. Don’t queue ranked without them.
The full settings table: default vs recommended
Every setting that matters, default value, and what to change it to. Apply this whole list and you’ll feel the difference inside one game.
| Setting | Default | Recommended | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Attack Move Click | Unbound | A | Closest-to-cursor target priority. Single biggest mechanical upgrade. |
| Attack Move (Hold) | Unbound | Shift+A | Held-down attack-move for kiting fights. |
| Quick Cast on All Abilities | Off (normal cast) | On (Q/W/E/R) | Casts trigger on key release. Faster combos, shorter reaction window for opponents. |
| Smart Cast Self – Flash | Off | On (F) | Flash on yourself with one keystroke. Flash+R combos become frame-perfect. |
| Quick Cast Range Indicator | Off | On (taste) | Visual range indicator on key press. Keep on while learning, off once memorized. |
| Range Indicator on Champion Mouseover | Off | On | Hover an enemy to see their attack/spell range. Better trade decisions. |
| Auto Attack | On | Off | “Off” means your champion stops auto-attacking after moving. Cleaner last-hitting under tower. |
| Show Health Bar Sizes | Off | On | Different bar lengths show relative max HP. Faster threat reads. |
| Show Spell Cast Time | Off | On | Visual indicator on enemy spell casts. Read interrupt windows. |
| Camera Move Speed | 40 | 50-60 | Snappier minimap-to-action panning. Set higher if you run unlocked camera. |
| Camera Lock | Off | Off (manual) | Manual camera = full map awareness. Bind Space to center on champion. |
| Camera Shake | On | Off | Visual noise on every Q cast and ult. Off = readability up by 20%. |
| HUD Scale | 1.00 | 0.85-0.95 | Smaller HUD = more game on screen. Set as small as you can read. |
| Minimap Size | ~30 | 50-65 | Big minimap = better roam reads and gank tracking. Worth the screen space. |
| Minimap Move | Click | Move on Press | Smoother camera-to-minimap pings without misclicking. |
| Show Network Latency Graph | Off | On | Catch lag spikes before they cost you a kill. |
| Frame Rate Cap | 60 FPS | Monitor Hz | Cap at your monitor refresh. 144Hz monitor = 144 or 240 cap. Heat down, input feel up. |
| VSync | Off | Off | Adds input delay. Leave off unless you’re seeing screen tearing. |
| Anti-Aliasing | Off | Off | GPU cost for negligible visual gain. Stays off. |
| Cursor Trail | On | Off | Off looks cleaner; cursor reads better in fights. |
| Trinket Hotkey | 4 | 4 (or F4) | Some pros remap to F4 to free up 4 for an item slot. Try both. |
| Ping Wheel – Danger | Default | Default | Don’t remap. Your teammates send pings; you need the muscle memory. |
Apply the list end-to-end and the climb gets a couple of percentage points easier. CS goes up. Kiting actually works. Your Flash engages don’t whiff because of a click. (We had a Plat 2 ADC client who switched to attack-move on cursor between sessions and his CS jumped from 6.8/min to 8.2/min inside a week. The kit didn’t change; the input layer caught up to what he was already deciding. He hit Emerald 3 in 3 weeks of normal play.)
For more on the CS math itself – and the per-rank CS benchmarks you should be hitting after this settings pass – see our breakdown of CS per minute by rank. The settings remove the friction; the practice does the rest.
Camera setup: unlocked, fast, and centered
The camera setting is the single most under-discussed setting in low elo. Roughly 70% of Bronze and Silver players run camera lock; almost no pro does. Locked camera caps your information at one screen width. Manual camera lets you scroll to the fight while still farming, watch the jungler’s pathing, and pre-position for a roam without dying.
The hybrid setup that most pros run:
- Camera Lock: off. Free camera by default.
- Center Camera on Champion: bound to Spacebar. Tap to snap back to your champion. Hold for semi-locked camera.
- Camera Move Speed: 50-60. Default 40 is too slow for the minimap-to-action panning manual camera needs.
- Edge Pan: off. The mouse-near-edge pan is the worst camera setting in the game. Disable it. Move the camera with the minimap or with held-Spacebar.
The first 3 games on unlocked camera you’ll lose track of your champion. By game 5 you won’t notice the difference. By game 15 you’ll wonder how anyone plays with locked camera.
Hotkey table: the bindings most pros run
The keyboard layout pros actually use. Most of this is default; the parts that aren’t matter.
| Action | Default key | Pro-standard key |
|---|---|---|
| Abilities Q W E R | Q W E R | Q W E R (don’t remap) |
| Summoner Spells | D F | D F (don’t remap) |
| Trinket | 4 | 4 or F4 |
| Item Slots | 1-6 | 1-6 (don’t remap) |
| Attack Move Click | Unbound | A |
| Self Cast | Alt + ability | Alt + ability (default) |
| Center Camera | Y | Spacebar |
| Lock Camera Toggle | Y | Y or unbound |
| Ping Wheel | G + drag | G + drag (don’t remap) |
| Smart Ping (Generic) | Alt + click | Default |
| Recall | B | B (don’t remap) |
| Shop | P | P or F1 |
| Show Scoreboard | Tab | Tab (don’t remap) |
| Toggle Sticky Camera | Unbound | Shift+Y or unbound |
| Stop Action | S | S (don’t remap – it’s how you cancel auto attacks) |
If your climb has plateaued at the input layer and you don’t want to spend two weeks rewiring muscle memory, our LoL division climb boost team plays the current meta on the standard pro settings every day – the rank you finish at is the rank that holds when you load back in. For most players though, the boring path is the right one: change the settings, queue 15 normals, and let the inputs catch up to the decisions you’re already making.
Trinket, ward, and ping bindings
The micro-setup that vision-savvy players run.
- Trinket on 4 (or F4). Default 4 is fine. Some pros remap to F4 so they can use the regular 4 slot for boots-and-Vamp-Scepter early build phases. Test both.
- Smart Ping: Alt + click. Don’t change this. Your wide-ping (G) and your smart-ping (Alt+click) cover 90% of solo-queue comms.
- Ping Wheel: G+drag. The 2024 ping-wheel system added the “On the way,” “Push,” and “Need vision” pings, and they’re worth learning. More on which ones to spam in our take on the vision score guide: vision pings drive ward priority in low elo more than ward purchases do.
- Sweeper / Oracle: hotkey same as trinket. When you swap trinkets to the sweeper, the bind doesn’t change. Don’t fumble it in the fight.
Audio settings: the unsexy edge
Audio gets ignored. It shouldn’t. Three settings:
- Master Volume: 50-70. Audio cues like footsteps in brush, summoner spell pops, and ult activations matter as much as visual ones above Plat.
- Music: off. Mute the soundtrack. You’ll hear ability hits and CDs cleaner without it.
- Voiceover: 20-30 if on at all. The pentakill announcer is fun. The Baron-stolen panic from your jungler is more useful information.
The Riot support docs on Riot’s Quick Cast support article are the canonical reference if you want to dig deeper into the smart-cast variations; for the broader settings tuning workflow including monitor calibration, Mobalytics’ in-game settings guide covers the rest.
Common settings mistakes that cost you LP
Three mistakes we see on basically every Silver-Gold account we audit before a climb order.
- Running camera lock past Bronze. Map awareness is gated by how much of the map you can see. Locked = one screen. Unlocked = the whole map. The 3-game discomfort cost is worth a season’s LP.
- HUD scale at 1.00 or higher. The HUD is genuinely too big at default. Push it to 0.85-0.95 and you’ll see the lane state more clearly. Bigger HUD doesn’t help your reads; it occludes them.
- Auto-attack on. Auto-attack on means your champion keeps swinging after you move. Tower-diving for last hits becomes a 1-in-3 chance of dying because you stuck for an extra auto. Turn it off and last-hit deliberately.
Camera shake on by default is also one of LoL’s oldest crimes – 15 years of screen-wobble during the most important teamfights, ship-day default. Turn it off and your readability jumps by a noticeable amount in the next teamfight.
Frequently asked questions
What are the best LoL settings to climb?
Three settings move the win-rate needle more than the other dozen combined: Attack Move on Cursor (Player Practice / Attack Move Click bound to A), Quick Cast on All Abilities, and Smart Cast Self for Flash. Bind those, queue 15 normals to get used to them, and your CS, kiting, and engage windows tighten immediately. Everything else – HUD scale, camera shake, range indicators – is comfort tuning.
Should I use Quick Cast or Smart Cast in LoL?
Quick Cast on all abilities (Q/W/E/R). The cast triggers on key release at your cursor position, so it’s faster with fewer inputs per combo. Pair it with Smart Cast Self bound to Flash and any ground-targeted summoner spells. Quick Cast Range Indicator on if you’re still learning ranges; off once they’re memorized.
What is Attack Move Click in LoL?
A setting under Hotkeys -> Player Practice. Bind “Attack Move Click” to A. When you press A and click, your champion attacks the enemy closest to your cursor, not the enemy closest to your champion model. Big upgrade for kiting (Vayne, Vex), long-range last-hitting (Jinx, Caitlyn), and orb-walking (Riven, Yasuo). Bind it before your next ranked game.
Should I lock the camera in League of Legends?
No. Manual camera (unlocked) doubles your map awareness compared to locked camera. Bind Spacebar to “Center Camera on Champion” so you can snap back when you need to. Camera Move Speed at 50-60. Edge Pan off. The first 3 games feel weird; the gain is permanent.
What HUD scale do pros use?
Most LCK and LEC pros run HUD scale between 0.80 and 0.95. The smaller HUD frees up screen real estate for the actual game and the map. Drop yours to whatever you can still comfortably read – default 1.00 is bigger than anybody actually needs.
Should I cap FPS in LoL?
Cap to your monitor’s refresh rate. 144Hz monitor – cap at 144 or 240 FPS. Uncapped FPS on a 144Hz panel just heats your GPU without rendering frames the panel can display. Vsync off (adds input delay). Anti-aliasing off.
What settings do pros actually use?
Quick Cast on all abilities, Attack Move Click on A, Smart Cast Self for Flash, manual camera with Spacebar center, HUD scale 0.85-0.95, camera shake off, minimap size 50-65, FPS capped to monitor Hz, Vsync off. The keyboard layout itself stays default – Q W E R, D F summoners, 1-6 items, B recall.
Change the three settings that matter (attack move click, quick cast all, smart cast self Flash), queue 15 normals to get the muscle memory in, and ranked from there feels different. If the climb is the bottleneck instead of the inputs, our team can boost the climb on your schedule – same account, same MMR profile, top-tier boosters playing the standard pro settings every day. The settings menu won’t carry you alone, but it removes the friction underneath every decision you’re already making.