League of Legends: Experimental Attack-Move Change is Coming Soon

Riot Vesh, a game designer for Riot Games’ pride and joy League of Legends, has just announced an upcoming change to attacking and moving. That’s right. Attacking and moving. At the same time.

Radical, dudes.

The experimental attack-move (holding shift + right clicking, not to be confused with normal movement or attacking) changes will be testing on the PBE next cycle!

And so with this, you are probably thinking: what does this mean for the future of League of Legends? Will this affect current play styles? Will this make the game more or less difficult to play?

Please be aware that this is SUPER experimental and not something that will happen tomorrow or the next couple of months.

Here is some information in which you should know about the experiment Riot Games is conducting: 

I’ve made a change to the way attack-move works that will be going to PBE tomorrow start of the next PBE cycle. Please be aware that this is SUPER experimental and not something we’re shipping right now. I really want to get your feels feedback and start tuning this to see if it’s something we would want to keep.

Currently if you attack move in this situation, the Annie closest to Vayne will be attacked. Even though the cursor was clicked right next to (but not quite on top of) the other Annie:

With this change, you will instead attack the unit closest to your cursor when clicking attack move, within specific constraints: 

1. The enemy must be within 250 units of your cursor click
2. The enemy must be at least within 50 units of your max attack range (If the enemy is between your attack range and 50 units past your attack range, you will only “run backwards” to hit them if your cursor was within 50 units of the enemy out of the maximum 250 scan)

Attack move will still work the same in any other case that doesn’t meet the above two criteria. The idea is to capture your intent when it comes to attack moving. Where you actually trying to click that guy four pixels from your cursor who had two silver bolts on him? Instead of attacking that minion near your feet, you will actually attack what you intended.

Here, Vayne is attacking the bot that is directly next to her cursor instead of the one closest to her.

Here, Vayne is prioritizing the Annie that was closet to her attack move click instead of the minions directly in front of her (note that Annie was the closest thing at the time Vayne clicked, but she moved a bit before this screenshot was taken):

This is a pretty big change, and it’s highly experimental. I want to try to tune it more to make playing ADC feel less clunky, so ADC mains especially please send feedback this way! I will be making a feedback post in PBE as well when the feature goes live to that environment.”

He later continued in the thread, explaining how the attack-move system should “ideally” feel the same to people who already used it. The system simply adds new target priorities when your intent is to attack something that isn’t the closest.

To help players understand what exactly has changed in-game, he noted, there will be a circle indicator to replace the red crosshair when you click to attack – this is to indicate what the boundaries are.

Vesh also replied to someone misinterpreting the change as “removing orb walking”: Orb walking is going to be same – it will simply be easier to accomplish.

In response to concerns that this change would “dumb down” the game:

“We could make the selection radius of every champion a 5 pixel circle, and that would certainly make the game harder. Is the game better like that though? Just because an antiquated game system made an action harder doesn’t mean making the input less frustrating dumbs down the game. It can make it deeper by allowing carries to care about the things we WANT to test them on (positioning, timing, etc). 

Right now attack move doesn’t require you to use a precise click at attack the closest target anyway. If you want to attack something that isn’t the closest target, you will need to click exactly on their selection radius (which is like a quarter the size of an Osu circle) and then click where you want to move to and repeat that multiple times a second.

The goal of this new system is to allow people to have more a variety of options when it comes to auto attacking in order for the system to feel responsive to the commands of attack-move.