Improving my aim in apex legends
“Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it burned in one”
You hear enemy footsteps running up the stairs. You throw an arc star to slow them down so you can round the corner for cover. The grenade goes off without hitting them and the enemy floods into room, guns ready. You draw your gun and aim down the sights to take out The Lifeline, but you miss all but one bullet. So, in hopes of knocking them, you switch to your second gun and land two bullets out the entire clip before the enemy, Octane, shows up to help The Lifeline finish you off. Being unable to aim or hit our targets is not an uncommon problem. This is a problem that I deal with a lot, and even though I hit my targets occasionally, I can never seem to finish the job. So, to fix this problem, I came up with my own training routine to improve my aim and hopefully in time, I can improve my aiming skill to that of a pro, if I am lucky.
The first thing that I need to adjust before anything else is the mouse settings such as the dpi and the sensitivity. I already settled on having a dpi of 800 and a sensitivity of 1.7. The reason for these settings is that this is what allows me to get a 360 degree turn from one solid movement from my mouse. This will change from person to person depending on your mouse movement style (wrist or arm) and the amount of space on your desk.
So, the two types of aim styles we will practice is tracking and flicking. These two are the main types of aiming. Tracking is just following your target while shooting and also landing your shoots in the process (that last part is important). Flicking is going from the middle of your screen and snapping to an enemy target as fast as you can while making your crosshair land on your target. Now in order to practice these styles, we are going to start up the program called Kovaaks Aim Trainer and use its new mode called trainer. In this mode, we will be practicing both flicking and tracking, and they have a skill progression system already setup for each style that works differently from each other as well.
So, tracking has a rank progression (the better you do in a level the harder it gets), and an adaptive progression for flicking (it will allow you to progress after you cover your weaknesses). Now in order to make the most of these scenarios I need to set goals. These goals are simple and straight forward with how they are set up. The goal for tracking will be to get to diamond before I get to the next stage. With diamond being the highest rank and the difficulty changing mid-practice, getting to diamond will allow me to get the most out of each stage rather than just playing to completion. Now the flicking course will have a very different requirement for advancing. As I said before, the flicking course has an adaptive progression system. This means it will advance you if there are no weaknesses in your training. If it detects any problems, for instance you are having a harder time hitting targets in the lower hand side of the screen when the session is over, it will tell you and ask if you would like to make changes according to its findings in order to help you improve. Now you can choose to not make the changes needed for you to improve but then what is the point of doing this if you reject the changes? This system is setup to practice all your weak points before letting you progress on to the next level, making sure you are ready to move on.
Now for me to get the most out of all of this, I need to set out some time in order to practice these two training methods. After I spent some time on google looking for a good range of practice, I have made a decision. In total, I will practice for an hour with each mode getting 30 minutes each. The reason for this time is that after my research, I found that 1- 2 hours are the time you should shoot for when practicing. The reason for this is that after the 2 hours mark, the benefits of practice start to decline and becomes completely useless at the 4-hour mark when done continuously. There is nothing saying I cannot do more after about 15 – 30 mins of rest but I should still leave room for other things to practice.
As the old saying goes “Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it burned in one.” I need patience when dealing with this endeavor and I need to stay focused. I will not improve my aiming skills to the level of Shroud’s or Imperialhal’s in over a night. This will take time and dedication; I need to come to terms that it will take a long time for me to master my aim. During this time, I will switch mouse sensitivity, change my training routine, and some days I will be fighting my urges to slack off more than practicing. I need to ensure that I keep this up in order to actually see improvement. Slacking off is a slippery slope that if not controlled properly, could cause me to make everything pointless.