Regardless of your rank or how many years of experience you have playing first-person shooter games, you can always improve your aim. There's not a single person in this world who thinks their aim is the best it can be and there's no room for improvement.
For beginners, finding the right sensitivity can be tough. Sensitivity also has a bunch of variables. What's the weight of the mouse you're using? What are your DPI settings? What material is your mousepad? How much desk space do you have? All of these variables combined can make it tough for someone new to figure out what sensitivity to use.
My recommendation is to calculate your eDPI, which is done by taking your in-game sensitivity and multiplying it by your mouse DPI. In my case, since my VALORANT sensitivity is 0.345 and my DPI is 800, my eDPI equals 276 (0.345 (in-game) x 800 (DPI) = 276 eDPI). If you are just starting to play first-person shooters, or even new to using a mouse and keyboard. You want to make sure your eDPI is within the 200 - 550 range (in my opinion). You want a sensitivity you can control, that's not too fast but at the same time not too slow.
Ok, you've picked a sensitivity, now how do you know if it's good or not?
Load up the Range in VALORANT and select an agent. Shoot Practice on the Skills Test menu. Pick a bot, put your crosshair on its head and start strafing left and right. Keep your crosshair on the head as you move around. If you can't do this simple drill, change your sensitivity until you find one where you can. This is where factors like desk space come into play. If you are a wrist aimer and have limited desk space, your sensitivity will be higher. If you aim with your arm and have a ton of desk space, your sensitivity can be lower because you have more room to move.
Once you can perform this drill easily, you can move on to training your aim.
I use Aim Lab to warm up, practice, and train my aim. If you haven't downloaded Aim Lab, it's available on Steam. If you're installing Aim Lab for the first time you want to make sure your settings are correct.
Here's how:
Launch Aim Lab
Click on the "Settings" button in the bottom right-hand corner
Click "Controls"
Change the "Game Profile" to VALORANT
Change your "Sensitivity" to match the value in VALORANT
Here are my recommendations on which tasks you should play and why they are beneficial. If you're brand new to first-person shooter games, I would suggest playing each task 3-5 times daily to start. If you are using this playlist for warming up, play each task until you reach 85%+ of your personal best score. Example: If your personal best for Gridshot is 96k, play it until you reach 81,600+ then move on to the next task.
Gridshot Ultimate: This has quickly become the benchmark for aim training. Everyone wants that 100k score, but it's a great task for beginners because the targets are stationary and large. This task alone trains accuracy, speed, and flicking. As a beginner, you want accuracy. It's okay to have a low score but 100% accuracy. Don't be discouraged if your scores are low initially, when I first started playing Gridshot I had a 50k score. Eventually, it got to 60k and then 70k all the way to 97k. I still haven't achieved that 100k score but maybe I will soon! This task can be found in Aim Lab under Tasks > Flicking > Gridshot Ultimate.
Spidershot Speed: The purpose of this task is to train your flicks. The reason I play the Speed version of Spidershot is that the targets are extra large and never get smaller. My focus when playing this task is to draw straight lines to the targets and build my muscle memory. This task can be found in Aim Lab under Tasks > Speed > Spidershot.
Motionshot Ultimate: All the tasks up until this one have been large stationary targets. Now it's time to train with targets that change in size and move across your screen to improve your overall tracking and aim. This task can be found in Aim Lab under Tasks > Flicking > Motionshot.
ValorantAscentHeadshot: Being able to move your mouse left and right along the horizontal axis is a critical movement in a tactical shooter. You need to be able to move around the map and keep your crosshair at head height, which for the most part is left and right. This task can be found in Aim Lab under Tasks > VALORANT > ValorantAscentHeadshot.
Sixshot Ultimate: This task is a lot harder than the ones above but it will help you with precision. The size of these targets is similar to the size of heads in VALORANT. This task is preparing you to hit those hard shots in-game. This task can be found in Aim Lab under Tasks > Flicking > Sixshot.
ValorantAscentWallPeek: This task is to implement movement into your mechanics. Being able to peek effectively is a fundamental skill to being good at a tactical shooter game. This task is very basic but will help you build good habits of strafing and shooting. Try and control your movement to take 1v1 fights. Don't strafe out too far and reveal yourself to multiple bots at the same time, and make sure your movement has stopped before shooting your gun. This task can be found in Aim Lab under Tasks > VALORANT > ValorantAscentWallPeek.
We're not done! You've found your sensitivity and you've trained a combination of accuracy, speed, flicking, tracking, and movement using Aim Lab. Now it's time to practice your skills in-game using the range.
Press F3 in the range and select either Easy, Medium, or Hard. Remember those skills you just trained in Aim Lab? You're going to use them here. Moving your mouse left and right along the horizontal axis (same as ValorantAscentHeadshot) and resetting your aim to the middle (same as Spidershot and Motionshot) to give yourself the best chance to kill these bots. The only difference now is the recoil of your weapon is introduced. You can't press mouse1 consecutively or else your weapon won't shoot accurately. You want to tap mouse1 and then let the gun reset by not shooting for a second (it's actually less than 1 second), then tap mouse1 again, rinse and repeat. It should look like this. In my practice, I also throw in movement so I can practice strafing, stopping, and shooting.
The last drill is shooting the floating targets behind you in the range. The goal is to burst enough bullets to break the targets, let your recoil reset, and then burst the next target. When you burst your weapon, you will have to pull your crosshair down while shooting ever so slightly to make sure your bullets land in the right spot. As always try and implement movement as well. Strafe, stop, burst, strafe, stop, burst. In VALORANT as soon as you let go of your movement key your first bullet will be accurate.
That's it for the beginner guide to aiming! Hope you enjoyed it. If you haven't already signed up for an account here, please do and you can leave comments for me below.