How to Improve Your Aim on PC – Apex Legends
After not having played an FPS for over 7 years, I knew when I came to Apex Legends I would need to spend a LOT of time practicing my aim. While it’s something I’m still very much working on, I wanted to share what I am doing to practice and train with you guys! Getting good aim in Apex Legends comes down to 3 things: finding the right sensitivity, doing some aim drills (when you’re first getting started), and practicing.
Finding the Right Sensitivity
Finding the sensitivity that’s best for you is extremely important when learning how to aim. Stereotypically, newer players tend to play with much higher sensitivity than they should, relying on their wrist to aim instead of playing at a lower sensitivity and using their arm. While wrist aiming isn’t bad, it’s way easier to overshoot and harder to be precise with a higher sensitivity. Plus, in my opinion, it’s much healthier for your wrist long term to aim with your arm instead of constantly flicking your wrist back and forth for hours on end while you play Apex Legends.
What I personally recommend is playing with a lower DPI on your mouse, either 400 or 800 depending on your preference, and adjusting your in game sensitivity over time. Effective DPI is also an important thing to consider when talking about FPS sensitivity, and it is simply your mouse DPI multiplied by your in game sensitivity. For example, someone with 400 DPI and 2.0 mouse sensitivity has the same effective DPI as someone with 800 DPI and 1.0 mouse sensitivity. Most people I think will end up between 1000-2000 effective DPI, so play around with it and see what feels best for you personally, and the way we determine that is with the aim drills I am going to list below. If you find yourself constantly overshooting during these drills, lower your sensitivity, but if you find yourself constantly undershooting, raise your sensitivity. Once you pick a sensivitiy that feels good overall, stick with it for a week or two and adjust accordingly, or keep it. Constantly changing your sensitivity every other day wont allow you to build up the muscle memory needed to hit your flick shots and track your targets like it’s second nature!
Aim Drills
Head into the firing range inside of Apex Legends and grab the guns you want to practice with. If it’s a shotgun, I recommend using a purple bolt for maximum fire rate to make the process faster. For other guns I’d recommend grabbing a purple magazine and your favorite sight of choice (or the one you feel you need the most practice with). I personally wouldnt pick up a barrel stabilizer or a stock since they help make your aim easier; practicing with the guns without attachments will help you win the earlier gunfights, and make your control of the weapons even better once you grab those attachments.
Flick Drill
Aim down the sight with your weapon at one of the red target dummies that has three targets on either side of it, and then flick your arm to shoot at the targets to the right of the dummy. Take a shot at the first target, then bring your crosshair back to the middle, and then repeat this process for the other two targets to the right of the target. Repeat this until your right flick feels good, and then do this for the targets to the left of the dummy. Refer to the video above if you need clarification!
Tracking Drill
Aim down the sight at one of the various moving targets in the firing range, and simply track it with your crosshair for a minute or two, and repeat this with the various moving targets around the firing range to practice various distances and the amount of arm movement required. Refer to the video above if you need clarification!
Random Target Acquisition
Aim at random targets around the map and take shots. Your goal with these drills is to acquire your targets as quickly as you can and shoot them accurately. Refer to the video above if you need clarification!
Slide Shooting
Grab your close range weapon of choice and practice running and sliding in front of the red target dummies, acquiring them as your target and them burning them down with your weapon as quickly and accurately as you can. Refer to the video above if you need clarification!
Recoil Control
This is arguably one of the most important tips in this guide and that is learning how to control the recoil of the weapons in Apex Legends. Guns in Apex use predictive recoil, not random recoil, so a gun’s recoil pattern is the same every time you pick up that gun. More often than not, heavy guns will shoot up and to the left, light runs will go up and to the right, and energy weapons will shoot straight up. What this means is that in order to control the recoil, you’ll want to drag your mouse down and to the right for heavy weapons, down and to the left for light weapons, and straight down for energy weapons. Grab you favorite guns and learn their recoil patterns, and it will help you laser opponents down significantly faster!
Practice
Now while aim drills and getting the perfect sensitivity are all well and good, you need to put these things to practice. Work on your drills when you’re newer to the game, if you want to warm up your wrist/arm for the day, or if you’re on a bad tilt and need to recenter yourself. Otherwise, focus on just getting out there and practicing! If you find yourself missing a lot, slow down and reset yourself; a lot of times if you focus too hard or get too worked up you can over-compensate. If you are playing and you just cant hit anything, go back and adjust your sensitivity via the aim drills in the firing range and get back out there!
