How to Improve Aim in FPS Games
Nothing is quite as satisfying as not missing a single bullet on your target in games like Apex Legends, Call of Duty, Overwatch, etc. A lot of modern games focus heavily on aim therefore practicing it before jumping in-game will allow you to play more confidently and rely on your mechanical skills more.
Getting good at aiming will not just be an overnight task and will require you to dedicate significant chunks of time to improve your setup, sit in aim trainers, and finally play the game of your choice a lot.
Getting the Right Gear
No matter how hard you will train or how many hours you will spend in-game, if you do not have the necessary tools to express your aim properly you will not excel at out-aiming your opponents.
Competitive shooter eSports are like every other type of mainstream sports where to be a good race car driver you need a fast car. For FPS shooters you will need things like an excellent mouse that has a pixel-perfect sensor and is the right shape and weight for your grip, a good monitor with a fast refresh rate, and a decent mouse pad that will allow you to move freely and be precise with your aim (Odin Infinity, Artisan Hien, MPC450).
Good hardware will not make you a god-aimer but having these tools available will definitely allow you to grow faster since your talent will not be bottlenecked by your setup.
Aim Training
In the ancient days of CS:GO boomers the advice was to always play your game for thousands of hours and never change your sensitivity or settings. Nowadays we have left the dark ages of guessing what will improve your aim and we have specialized tools that will guarantee improvement in your mechanical skill of mouse control.
You can opt for trainers such as KovaaK’s or Aim Lab which will be like a gym for your aim. These tools will be as good as your implementation so doing proper research and using additional tools such as benchmarks from reputable aim groups like Voltaic will lead to great results.
These guys have a lot of resources that can both explain the theoretical aspects of aim and also offer you fundamental playlists, game-specific playlists, and benchmarks that will help you track your growth and also motivate you to work harder towards getting better aim.
Do not expect to grow your aim by brain-dead clicking in aim trainers for hours thinking you are working towards something great. Once again – aim training is as effective as you make it so research the topic more, join more aim groups like Pure or Revosect and find what works best for you.
It is also important to mention that aim trainers help with the purely mechanical skill of mouse control which helps you with aim in general, but these cannot cover in-engine game-specific mechanics of aim which need to be acquired through actual gameplay.
Play Your Game
Aim training is extremely efficient and will result in fast growth with only a hundred hours of intense aim training resulting in thousands of hours of aim practice that would have to be done in your game of choice. The reason for this is that aim training offers condensed routines where you intensively aim all the time while in games you also spend a lot of time on other things (looting, positioning, rotating, etc).
In the end, each game has its own type of movement and target speed therefore aim training cannot cover all the specific types of aim you will deal with in your game of choice. It is no surprise then that if you want to get better at aiming in a game you will need to invest hours in that game specifically.
It is important to understand that what we define as “aim” a lot of times depends on many more factors like positioning, rotations, understanding of game mechanics, etc. To acquire these skills that will complement the purely mechanical skills of aiming you will get through aim training you will need to dedicate time and play whatever you have decided to get better at.
A solid routine for improving your aim in a game is to do a 30-45 minute warm-up in your aim trainer of choice which will get you to your peak level and then playing your game for however much you want to drill every other aspect of aim through gameplay.
Being consistent and developing your aim training routine for your needs and then playing your game with the intent to get better aim will inevitably result in you growing as an aimer. Consistency is key and keeping this routine up even through periods of time where your growth is slower will not only help with aim but with mental fortitude and the resilience needed to get better at any game.
It’s time to click heads gamers.