After 15 years, filled with dozens of op-items and way too overtuned Champions, Riot Games announces arguably one of League of Legends' biggest changes.
Have you ever thought “I wish I could control with WASD”? No? What sounds like a joke is soon to become reality and a new control scheme will soon be available to you.
Right-Click To Move
When League of Legends split off from DotA back then, the controls had already been established by the previous strategy game Warcraft 3. The button layout has been the same for 15 years:
The standard abilities on Q,W,E, the ultimate ability on R, summoner spells on D and F (Flash on F-Gang, rise) and the champion control on right-click. If you move the cursor over a target, your character will also shoot there. But nobody expected what Riot Games has now come up with.
How Is It Supposed To Work?
The legendary League of Legends content creator “SkinSpotlights” is as important as you can be for a community. New skins in the next patch? Watch the video on his channel. Individual interactions or all voice lines of a champion? SkinSpotlights. In one of his latest threads, he briefly introduces the new control system - and it poses more questions than it answers.
WASD will be coming as an new official input methodFlash has 3 settings, "Cursor", "WASD with Cursor Enhanced", "WASD with Cursor Fallback". Unsure what they doCan still click to move under WASDHas a toggle to smart cast to shoot in the direction your character is facing pic.twitter.com/lHceFXmI1A
— SkinSpotlights (@SkinSpotlights) May 14, 2025
Here we can also see that it includes individual modes for the summoner spell Flash.
It is important to note that these are screenshots of the public beta environment. In other words - features and other content that need to be tested for the time being. This means that not all changes will necessarily be transferred to the live servers.
The Community Is Beyond Divided
This change may sound exciting at first, but it doesn't sound all that important. If you don't want to switch, just don't....right? While there are many players who are extremely excited about an update like this for various reasons, there is also the other side.
The claim that a change like this could kill the once most-played online game doesn't just come from blind rage.
Is League Becoming Too Easy?
It is hard to deny that the change makes some mechanics in the game much easier. The so-called kiting, describes a mechanic in which you keep a constant distance to the opponent, usually while running away, and stop briefly to attack the opponent. Pro players who are good at kiting have the movement in such a way that standing still hardly costs them any speed.
To illustrate the whole thing well, here is a good clip on reddit.
This is difficult to explain at first, but perhaps even more difficult to execute: Because you have to right-click where you want to go, move your pointer back over the opponent, click in front of you again to keep running... But the new change could make this technique, which actually requires extreme skill, child's play. By simply running with WASD and constantly aiming backwards with the cursor, you will probably no longer have any problems with it.
You Don't Switch - You Already Lost
Based on the example mentioned above, many players are scared of League of Legends future. The game is extremely competitive and certain skills have to be demanded. If you don't switch, you are definitely at a disadvantage. Because everything in the game revolves around maximizing the use of resources.
This not only affects every single match, but also the e-sports scene. There, everything is taken to another level of perfection and the question arises as to how these two fundamentally different types of control should be handled at a competitive level.
More and more people are also drawing parallels with League of Legends: Wild Rift, the mobile version of LoL. So there is speculation as to whether League on PC will simply be abolished soon. And even if it doesn't come to that, the game will be completely different to what it was before.
What do you think? Are you a fan of the new controls? Or are you worried about this news?