Attack moving or Attack Canceling

Question

I watch streams sometimes and i see the high elo Ranged AD move between each shot. Do they gain anything with this? And if so whats a good way to practice it.

Answer 1

I used to play dota for 8 years and I ve been playing LoL for a year now.

History of the skill

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The skill you talk about was at first developed by DotA players. In DotA, cancelling the post shot animation helped you in shooting a little faster - for an unskilled eye almost unnoticable. It helped mainly when you had a hero with orb skill like frozen arrow (drow ranger) or fire arrow (bone fletcher) and thus it was called orb walking. Players of LoL no longer calls that orb walking and therefore we can say there is no such a thing as orb walking in LoL, but because I am an old DotA player, I will dare to call it orb walking in the text below.

Keeping range

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As Lyrion and Rakesh Reddy say, you gain time to keep your distance between you and your target, so basically you will not get out of your attacking range and you will not lose vision. That is pretty important.

Keeping your character in motion

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Another advantage is that you keep your character moving, which makes you harder to hit with any skill shot:

• you move so it is generally harder than if you were standing at one spot
• you can move in different ways so it is harder to predict your next position

Positioning in a fight

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Last but not least important is the fact, that you position your self in the fight, which is what range ad carry really has to do. In order to win a fight, you always have to maintain secure position where you can shoot and dont get shot / focused. For instance:

You can shoot your enemy and meanwhile walk in a brush nearby giving you ultimate position for finishing your intensions (killing, harrasing, switch from harrasing to farming).

Practising "orb walking"

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If you want to practice orb walking, the best way to do it is to do it a lot. Doing it poorly in a game will cost you last-hits and positioning, so treat it initially like learning a new champion. Do it in Custom or AI games, then normal games, then bust your new skills out in ranked. I recommend starting by doing "laps" around a creep-wave with it. Just circle the wave and auto-attack (don't worry directly about last hitting), but move between auto-attacks. Once it's clear, find the next wave and repeat. When a wave gets to turret, you can do the same thing around the turret. This is a mechanical skill, and has a little variety between champions (in terms of when/how fast to cancel), so requires a great deal of practice to get absolutely correct.

Answer 2

Actually you gain the distance with each attack. Ive never played LOL, but I am a dota player so this answer is under assumption that same technique applies

When you release your projectile, it takes some time to reach enemy. So instead of just standing there you can move away from target or towards target so in case target is advancing or backing off, you can get few extra attacks. This works exceedingly better with heroes who release projectile instantaneously but their animation is long. So just cancelling that animation makes no difference. This is applicable to spells also. Cancel spell animation to gain extra attacks in same time.

Answer 3

Well basically the reason they move is so they can last hit effectively. If they do not move the character auto attacks and pushes the lane. You can press S to stop moving but once you start to attack or move you begin auto attacking again. So basically you are frozen in one spot if you press S. And you do not want to stay in one spot so the other team can hit you. Btw pushing the lane early games makes the minions waves stay closer to their turret, making it easier for the other team to harass you, easier for the jungler to gank you, harder for you to get in range of a last hit, and safer for the other ranged ad.

Answer 4

It depends what he is doing, if he is last hitting minions everytime it is to stop some of his attacks so he can last hit effectively. If he is attacking an enemy champion it is because he is following his movement. You can only autoshot from a certain range, and if the champion he is firing at keeps moving away, he should move along so that he can keep the enemy in range. And thus keep fireing.

Answer 5

Animation canceling gives you free positioning in between each attack. It costs you nothing if done properly, and so there's really not much of an excuse to not do it whenever possible.

Answer 6

There's two reasons to do this: animation cancelling and kiting.

Animation cancelling (aka orb walking) is used to speed up the time between auto attacks, and only works if the champion has an attack animation that can be cancelled partway without affecting the actual attack.

Kiting is the process of shooting and then moving to a better position; if accompanied by a slow effect (Ashe's frost arrow), it can prevent an enemy from reaching the shooter or escaping. In this video, look how Ashe moves between each shot to prevent Urgot from escaping.

Answer 7

There are some reasons to do this and it mainly depends on the situation.

While attacking minions

While attacking minions, it is important to move after auto attacking because if you don't, you will just start to auto attack another minion and that is not something good to do for a bunch of reasons that have already been stated here. If you do it, your movement is extremely predictable to your opponent, the lane will push, it will be harder to last hit and so on.

While attacking other champions

In this case, it may be useful to do this for positioning reasons. If you have the ability to do this effectively you may be able to dodge abilities and to not lose any auto attack which is obviously good. If you are attacking a caster, it will be harder for him to do damage if you move after attack. If you are versus a melee, he will have to come running to you everytime to attack you, while you can attack him always. And that it's called kiting him. Versus another ad ranged, he will lock on you, so moving won't change that and to win or lose is up to a whole lot of other reasons.

Every other case

However, if you watch streams closely you'll see that even in situations where there is no danger at all, people will go click on target-click out-click on target-click out. Against turrets, inhibitors and so on. I do it myself and here the main reason is one: habbit. I am so used to attack-move-attack-move that i do it all the time even if i'm attacking a turret alone in which case there is no advantage to do this compared to sit there and auto attack. It's kind of a way to train though.

Related to this, this technique, if you want to call it so, becomes fun when you start to have some attack speed. And by fun, i mean hard :D