What Is Kiting in LoL? (And How to Do It)

Kiting in League of Legends is the act of attacking an enemy while moving away from them, so you keep dealing damage without taking any back. The technique that makes it possible is stutter-stepping: canceling the recovery animation of each basic attack with a movement command, then re-issuing the attack as soon as your champion is ready to fire again. Done well, your champion looks like it's gliding backward while still hitting at full attack speed. The wiki defines kiting as "spacing a pursued target at or as close to attack/ability range as possible, while maximizing both safety and those attack/ability outputs." Settings and keybinds below.

How Kiting Works: The Three Phases of an Attack

Every basic attack in League has three animation phases:

Windup. The champion raises their weapon. The attack hasn't fired yet. You can cancel this by issuing a movement command, but doing so wastes the attack: no damage, and the attack timer rolls back.
Firing point. The instant the projectile or hit launches. Damage is now committed. After this point, the attack will land regardless of what you do.
Recovery. The follow-through animation. Your champion is locked into looking like it's still attacking, but the attack is already done. There is zero penalty for canceling this phase with a movement command.

Recovery is the window kiting exploits. By default, after firing an attack a champion stands still through the recovery animation before its idle behavior takes over. That standing-still time is wasted from a damage-and-positioning perspective: the attack is already in flight, but your champion is glued in place. A movement command issued the moment the attack fires cuts that lock short, and you immediately start moving while the projectile is still traveling.

The rhythm is: attack, move, attack, move. Each "attack" lands a full hit. Each "move" reclaims the recovery window for repositioning. Cycle that fast enough and you're dealing full DPS while constantly retreating, which is the whole point.

Kiting vs. Stutter-Stepping vs. Orb-Walking

These three terms get used interchangeably in YouTube comments and Reddit threads, but they're not synonyms. Getting them straight matters because two of them are real LoL mechanics and one of them isn't.

Kiting is the goal: maintain distance while damaging a target.
Stutter-stepping is the technique: cancel the recovery animation with a movement order to free your champion to reposition between attacks. Stutter-stepping is how you usually achieve kiting, but you can stutter-step without kiting (e.g. chasing while still firing) and you can kite without stutter-stepping (e.g. abilities with slows from max range).
Orb-walking is not a League of Legends mechanic. It's a DotA term. In DotA, certain ranged carries had attack-modifier abilities that looked like orbs (Drow Ranger's Frost Arrows, Viper's Poison Attack), and orb-walking referred to using those modifier-cast versions of the attack to hit an enemy without drawing creep aggro. League has no equivalent system. Many LoL guides use "orb-walking" as a fancy synonym for stutter-stepping or kiting, and they're wrong. The League wiki's stutter-stepping page calls this out directly.

Practically, when a coach tells you to "orb-walk the ADC," they mean kite using stutter-stepping. The terminology has bled across games even though the underlying mechanic didn't. Use kiting and stutter-stepping when you want to be precise about what's actually happening.

How to Set Up Attack-Move (The Setting That Makes Kiting Work)

Kiting at high speed is mechanically demanding because you need to issue an attack command and a movement command in quick alternation, on the same enemy, without accidentally walking into them when you click. League gives you two tools for this and one critical setting.

Attack-Move (default: A key)

Pressing A and then left-clicking issues an attack-move command. Your champion will move toward the click location and attack the first valid enemy that enters its acquisition range along the way. If you click directly on an enemy, it acts like a normal attack order on that target. The attack range indicator becomes visible while you're holding A.

Attack-Move Click (default: Shift + Right Click)

One-click version of the above. Your cursor's current position is used as the target location automatically, no second click needed. Range indicator does not show. This is the input most players actually use for kiting because it's a single press per attack instead of two.

"Attack Move on Cursor" Setting

This is the option that turns kiting from awkward into smooth. It lives under Settings > Game > Game, labeled "Attack Move on Cursor."

Off (default). When you attack-move, the game scans for the nearest enemy around your champion's position.
On. The scan happens around your cursor's position instead.

That difference is huge while kiting. With the setting off, if your cursor is over the enemy you want to hit but a tank is closer to your champion, your attack-move grabs the tank. With the setting on, your cursor decides the target, and you can aim attacks the same way you aim a Lux Q. Most ADC mains turn this on the first day they pick up the role.

If you want a deeper walkthrough of the keybind options and what to bind where, the dedicated attack-move guide covers the setup in detail.

Champions Best for Learning to Kite

Marksmen are the class kiting was designed around. The League wiki describes marksmen as ranged champions who "are capable of staying relatively safe by kiting their foes," and most of their power budget is paid for by the assumption that the player can kite competently.

The wiki's stutter-stepping page calls out a few champions explicitly:

Ashe. The simplest kiting champion in the game. Frost Shot makes every basic attack apply a slow, so the kite cycle becomes self-reinforcing: hit, slow, step back, hit again. She has no dashes, which means she has to kite to survive, and players who learn on Ashe build the muscle memory the cleanest.
Vayne. Forces you to chain attacks on a single target to keep Silver Bolts stacking. Tumble (Q) gives you a built-in repositioning tool that shortens the recovery animation, so Vayne kiting blends stutter-stepping with dashes.
Kalista. The hardest. Her passive (Martial Poise) lets her dash a short distance with every attack input, which the wiki calls "stutter-stepping incarnate." She can't manually cancel her own attack windup, so a smooth Kalista needs an attack speed build to feel right.
Draven. Stutter-stepping in service of catching Spinning Axes, not just dodging. The kite rhythm is dictated by axe trajectories, which adds an extra layer on top of the standard cycle.

Other champions with strong kiting profiles include Caitlyn (longest auto range in the game, plus Headshot resets), Kog'Maw (extreme attack speed scaling once W is up), Tristana (range grows with level), and Twitch (stealth opener into kite). Cassiopeia is the rare non-marksman who kites because her ability uptime is so high that the rhythm is identical.

Items and Stats That Help Kiting

Kiting scales with three things: how often you attack, how fast you can move, and whether your hits slow the target.

Attack speed. The shorter the gap between attacks, the less recovery time there is to cancel and the smoother the kite feels. Berserker's Greaves, Phantom Dancer, and Runaan's Hurricane all push attack speed. The default attack speed cap is 2.5 attacks per second, and a few items and abilities can lift that ceiling further.
Movement speed. Boots themselves matter. Phantom Dancer's passive grants a burst of move speed when you damage a champion, designed for exactly the kite scenario. Stormrazor (when it's in the game) and similar slow-on-hit items also help.
On-hit slows. Anything that slows the target you're kiting effectively widens the gap with no input cost. Frost Shot (Ashe), Slow Bolt (built-in to some kits), and Rylai's Crystal Scepter all do this.

One trap to avoid: Guinsoo's Rageblade changes how Vayne and similar champions kite. The on-hit conversion plus the attack-speed-uncapping interaction creates a damage profile where standing still and out-DPSing is sometimes correct, even though it feels wrong to a player trained to always stutter-step. Build choice matters more than the technique in those edge cases.

How to Not Get Kited (Counterplay)

If you're playing a melee champion against a marksman who knows how to kite, brute-forcing the trade by walking at them is how you die. The counterplay falls into three categories.

Gap closers. Dashes, leaps, and blinks let you skip the kite cycle entirely. The whole assassin class is built around this. Akali Shroud-into-E, Zed W shadow, Kha'Zix Leap, Diana R, Irelia Q chains, Fiora Q, Yone E. The wiki lists Disengage and Crowd Control as the two universal weaknesses of assassins, which is exactly what marksmen need against assassins. The reverse holds: a marksman caught without flash and without peel against a dash kit loses the fight before the kite cycle can start.
Hard CC. A single root, stun, or knockup breaks the kite rhythm completely. The marksman can't issue a movement command if they're not allowed to move. Leona Q, Nautilus Q, Ashe arrow back at the kiter, Lux E root, Morgana binding. Chain CC is even better, because it covers multiple attack windows.
Movement-speed runes and items. Phase Rush (Sorcery keystone) gives a burst of move speed plus slow resistance after three attacks or abilities, designed specifically to cover the gap-closing window for short-ranged champions. Stridebreaker bundles a dash with a slow, so you both close the gap and apply the same on-hit slow the kiter is using on you. Ghost as a summoner spell turns extended chases into kite-deniers; Hecarim and Sion players take it for that reason.

The strategic version: don't let yourself get caught alone in a long lane against a competent kiter. Kiting is at its strongest in 1v1 and 2v2 in open ground. In a 5v5 with a frontline, the kiter has to commit to a target, which exposes them to flanks. Force fights in chokepoints, in jungle brush, around walls, and the kite math collapses.

Practice Drills

Kiting is muscle memory. You can't think your way into a clean stutter-step at 2.0 attack speed; the rhythm has to live in your hands. Two drills cover most of what new players need.

Practice Tool, free movement. Pick Ashe. Spawn a target dummy. Walk away from it while attack-moving back toward it. Goal: every attack lands, your champion never stops moving for more than one beat. When that feels easy, raise your attack speed in Practice Tool and repeat. The tempo gets faster and the recovery cancel gets tighter.
Practice Tool, with bots. Spawn an intermediate bot Garen. Kite it from one side of mid lane to the other. Garen will Q-flash at you, and the goal is to keep the auto-attack cycle going while sidestepping his all-in. This adds the mental load of reading enemy abilities on top of the input cycle, which is closer to real games.

The progression from "I know what kiting is" to "I kite cleanly under pressure" is usually two to three weeks of conscious practice for fifteen minutes per day, plus the in-game reps. Most ADC mains hit the muscle-memory threshold inside a season.

Kiting Quick Answers

Why do they call it kiting? The visual analogy comes from kite-flying: you run forward while keeping your eyes locked on something pulling behind you, the way a kite-flyer watches the kite trailing in the air. The term predates League and shows up in early MMORPGs like EverQuest. The "killing in transit" backronym you'll see on Reddit isn't the actual etymology.
Is kiting the same as orb-walking? No. Orb-walking is a DotA mechanic for using attack-modifier abilities without drawing creep aggro. League doesn't have that system. The two terms are confused constantly but they refer to different games.
Is kiting only for ADCs? No, but it's most relevant for them. Cassiopeia kites with abilities. Kayle kites at later levels. Any ranged champion with a slow can kite a melee target that doesn't have a dash. Marksmen are just the class with the highest kite-skill ceiling.
Does the A key auto-attack? No. A key issues an attack-move command, which then needs a left-click for the location or target. Shift+Right Click is the one-press version that uses your cursor automatically.
What attack speed do I need to kite well? There's no threshold. Kiting works at any attack speed; the cycle just gets faster as the stat goes up. A 0.7 attack speed Ashe at level 1 can kite a Garen. The technique scales smoothly all the way to the 2.5 cap.