Okay, I'm not exactly new. I've been playing League for a few years, and have won more than I've lost. But all this time, I've played almost exclusively Annie (admittedly not so much anymore as she doesn't have a place in the current meta), Morgana, and Blitzcrank.

I want to diversify. And on that subject, I have a newbie question.

I tried playing Ahri. She's hot and a lot of fun, but I had difficulty controlling the dash element of her ult-- she seemed to dash in a random, uncontrollable direction each time I hit R, making it useless as a chase or escape, and unreliable as a juke.

I've been told by a friend that this is due to something paradoxically called "smartcast" which is on automatically for her ult.

How do I turn it off? I want to play Ahri, but being unable to aim her ult... well it's not fun.

It goes towards your mouse, just like flash

How do I disable it?

you cant turn it off. its like urgots q, nidalees leap thing, karthus q. just have to get use to it

You disable smart casting the same way you enabled it, by changing it in keeybindings

As was already stated though, it automatically jumps to where your cursor is

So basically I just can't play Ahri, Karthus, etc due to a mechanic that is un-removable and makes the champions unusable? Thanks a lot Riot.

Also Fs, I would never enable smartcast. I'm not that masochistic.

Matters of play style shouldn't be hard-coded in the game, they should be, well, matters of play style.

Maybe I'm approaching this from the wrong angle. As I said before, I main Blitzcrank and Morgana, two champs for whom pixel-perfect aim and ideal shots are worth waiting a half-second to line up.

Is there at least, at bare minimum, a way to turn on range indicators for smartcast abilities so I don't have to just guess how far and in what direction I will be firing off these abilities?

You are correct, Armored Revenger. I worded that poorly. I should have said "unusable to me". My apologies to Ahri players, Karthus players, and everyone else who has managed to work around this very unfortunate UI quirk.