League’s Biggest Control Change In Years
League of Legends has relied on classic mouse click movement for more than a decade. You right click to move, you aim abilities with your mouse, and your keyboard is mostly for casting skills and summoner spells. That is the traditional MOBA setup PC players are used to.
Riot Games is now shaking that up with an experimental WASD movement option in certain game modes. This change arrived in an update on December 3 and immediately set off heated debates across the League community.
Riot’s goal sounds simple. Most modern PC games use WASD for movement, so the team wanted League to feel more natural for completely new players who are coming from shooters or action games. Instead of learning to both move and attack with the mouse, they can move with WASD and aim attacks with the mouse, which feels more like an action game.
On paper that sounds good for accessibility, but once high level players got their hands on the new controls, the reaction became far more complicated.
Why Players Were Worried About WASD
When Riot first announced WASD support back in August, veterans quickly jumped to worst case scenarios. Some feared that the new scheme would basically build in aim assist for attack based champions and give WASD users unfair advantages in spacing and kiting.
Streamer and pro coach Marc "Caedrel" Lamont played an early closed test of the controls and came away thinking they might be extremely strong for precise positioning. He described it as feeling close to aim assist because of how easy it seemed to maintain perfect distance from an enemy while right clicking on them.
The concern was that for roles like attack damage carry, where every auto attack and every step of movement matters, WASD would hand players Grand Master tier spacing for free. That would completely change the skill ceiling of the role and could make traditional mouse click movement feel outdated overnight.
So the community went into the public beta expecting WASD to be overpowered. Instead, what they found was almost the exact opposite.
How WASD Actually Plays Right Now
Once WASD hit the public beta environment and then live testing, data minded players started to measure its impact. One Reddit user, J0rdian, did informal damage per second testing comparing kiting with normal mouse movement against kiting with WASD. Their results suggested that WASD loses a noticeable amount of DPS, especially at higher attack speeds.
The reason is tied to how League animation cancelling works. In the classic setup, top players learn to cancel the end of an auto attack animation with a movement command or another action, squeezing in extra attacks and staying mobile. That animation cancel timing is crucial to high level kiting.
With the current version of WASD:
- Attack animations no longer automatically cancel in the same way.
- You are effectively penalized if you keep pressing movement keys while an attack is firing.
- Riot has added an artificial attack speed nerf on the WASD scheme, which becomes more punishing on fast champions like Jinx or Twitch.
Players who dug into the numbers concluded that you cannot currently use animation cancelling to its full potential with WASD. As a result, serious min max players are sticking with the classic mouse only movement because it still offers better damage output and finer control once mastered.
Some tech savvy players did find ways to partially work around this. One breakdown shared by Riot producer Darcy Ludington highlighted a video where a player avoids much of the delay between autos by timing their inputs very carefully.
The trick is to release all WASD keys just before the attack fires, then alternate movement and attack in a strict rhythm: move, attack, move, attack. If you hit the timing, you can kite fairly well even with the built in penalty, but it demands focus and is far from the simple aim assist style control that people originally feared.
What This Means For League Players
So far the WASD experiment looks less like a doomsday scenario and more like a rough but interesting option. It clearly is not ready to dominate ranked play, and Riot has not even enabled it for ranked matches yet. That gives the balance team time to study real player behavior and decide how far to go with adjustments.
There are a few key takeaways for players:
- For beginners coming from shooters or action games, WASD can make movement feel more familiar and may reduce the learning curve when first trying League.
- For competitive players, the current WASD system is a net loss in damage and precision compared to the classic mouse only scheme.
- Riot has already tuned WASD with things like attack speed penalties to prevent it from being too strong, which might explain why it feels clunky or slow to some testers.
Riot senior tech game producer Darcy Ludington has said it will be more than a month before they share final conclusions. WASD is just one piece of a broader push to make League easier to pick up for new players, so they want to see how it performs in that context.
In other words, WASD right now is not about giving veterans a new meta breaking advantage. It is closer to an accessibility and onboarding experiment that still needs tuning. Expect more iterations, more testing, and plenty more arguments before it settles into its final form.
For PC gamers in general, it is an interesting sign of where long running titles are heading. Even games built on classic mouse click controls are starting to explore action focused schemes and modern PC expectations. Just do not expect the pro ADCs to drop their mouse precision any time soon.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/moba/league-of-legends-just-got-wasd-controls-after-16-years-and-you-can-probably-guess-how-smoothly-the-rollouts-going/
