Valorant: How to improve your aim

First and foremost, Valorant is a first person shooter. Despite having abilities to use, pulling a trigger is the game's bread and butter. The majority of your time with the game will be spent aiming your crosshair at enemies and pressing left click, successfully or unsuccessfully. It sounds so simple, but it’s actually really hard to do - especially if you’re new to a tactical, considered shooter like this.

If you fall on the more unsuccessful side of the aim bracket, then don’t fear, for we’ve put together a number of pointers to help you improve your aim. While it may seem like a lot of hard work for a videogame, it’s extremely rewarding when you begin landing headshots with ease. It’s not just a benefit you’ll gain for Valorant, but practically any other shooter too!

How to improve your aim in Valorant

Here are a few tips to help you get that aim sorted.

Upgrade your mouse setup

Want to take your aim to the next level? Well, you’ll need to invest in a gaming mouse if you don’t already have one. This will allow you to tinker with your sensitivity or DPI settings to find the perfect cursor sensitivity for you. They also have far better sensors than the usual plastic that gets bundled with PCs, which means you know for a fact that your mouse strokes will translate accurately to in-game movements without any faults.

We’d highly recommend opening up our Valorant: Best mouse sensitivity and DPI settings guide in another tab and having a read through the first couple of sections. These will take you through why gaming mice are so beneficial, how to turn off some pesky Windows settings, and how to adjust your sensitivity to find the perfect one for you.

We’d also recommend picking up a gaming mouse pad to compliment your gaming mouse. It’s no good purchasing a gaming mouse but swiping it on an uneven or rough surface. A decent sized mouse pad won’t set you back too much and it’ll guarantee your mouse swipes will be at their optimal accuracy.

Finally, a large mouse mat is better than a small one in our experience. It’ll offer far more room for every mouse gesture, especially if you’re playing with a low DPI.

Customise your crosshair

Valorant’s default crosshair isn’t going to cut it. Instead, customise one which you’re totally happy with. There are plenty of settings to tweak its colour, size, opacity, thickness, and more. Plus you can test it out in the training areas to see if it fits your playstyle.

Our Valorant: How to customise your crosshair page has you covered on this front, so make sure you have a glance at this before moving on.

Crosshair placement is crucial

When we first started playing CS:GO, we were directed to a video by a top player called adreN. It’s pretty old now, but we’d consider it a timeless classic which’ll guide you through how to place your crosshair optimally. And of course you’re probably thinking CS:GO?! But this is Valorant?! The basic principles carry over, no matter what game you’re playing.

CS:GO Pro adreN Tips - Aiming help - Crosshair Placement

Watch on YouTube

Video by adreN

Essentially, it’s all about holding your crosshair at a certain height on screen, and preemptively positioning it as much as possible. This means gliding it across a corner as you move around, or placing it in such a way that when you round the corner it’ll already by pointing at a popular sniping spot in the distance.

All of the principles he describes ring true for Valorant, more so than perhaps any other shooter as it’s incredibly similar to CS:GO. Give it a watch and it’ll transform the way you think about your mouse positioning.

Aim training exercises

Finally, a vital part of improving your aim is practice, practice, and more practice. Now you’ve got your mouse set up nicely, you’ll want to put all your newfound settings into action.

We’d recommend spending 10-15 minutes at the start of each play session spending time in the training area to hone your crosshair accuracy and build up your muscle memory.

Note how the player above moves their mouse back to the centre of the screen. This keeps your crosshair positioning neat and tidy, just like you’d want in a match, and it also allows you to flick right to left optimally.

There’s a variety of different training modes and we’d recommend working your way through a few which’ll help you practice different aspects of aim. Be creative too. Practice moving, stopping, then shooting. Or swinging your mouse hard from one side to the other, or rounding a corner and snapping to a target. Anything that challenges you at first will pay dividends the more you practice it.

We're big fans of the "Strafe/Streak" setup, which you can access by pressing [F3] and toggling these two options. This will make the bots spawn in one by one, but this time they'll strafe to avoid your crosshair. Once you've taken one out, another will spawn soon after, but never before - this means you can go at your own pace. From a personal standpoint, we've found this to feel a more natural way of practicing your aim as enemies tend to be just as unpredictable as these bots, rarely static.

Of course this will take time and effort, but it will absolutely pay off. Sure, it might take some readjusting, but trust us, you'll begin seeing results. Your hard work will be rewarded!

Aim training games

Following on from the section above, there are some strong options if you want to spice up your aim training exercises even more. Sometimes it's good to work on your aim in a different setting and these tools often have a ridiculous amount of customisation options, so much so, you can have more fun dinking heads.

A good starting point is Aim Lab over on Steam as it offers a decent selection of aim training exercises, plus it's not too hard to match your sensitivity to your Valorant one.

If you're after something quite different, Osu! is a rhymth, clicker game in which you'll move, swipe, and hold your mouse on dots which'll appear all over the screen. It's immensely satisfying, makes aiming fun, and you can ramp up the difficulty as you improve.