This has persisted since beta 1, where it was discussed in dozens of threads across numerous platforms. While not all players may be impacted, those affected have found the aiming difficulties in OW2 debilitating to their performance.
Kephri is complaining about it. Daniel Fenner just discussed it in his stream seconds go, and said that everyone he knows is commenting on it. It’s being discussed on Reddit as well:
It is not in any way, shape or form related to the DPS passive, and it is not related to the sensitivity discrepancy between OW1 and 2. It is not related to new SFX either. All those possibilities were conclusively ruled out through testing during beta 2.
I’m a bit of a hobbyist with regards to tweaking for system latency reductions. I consider myself very sensitive to input latency (not to be confused with ping or sim), and I’m very confident latency is to blame for this. IoStux theorized during beta that Blizzard’s telemetry to gather data in the background was increasing latency. Maybe he was right, and maybe it’s still the root cause.
Can we PLEASE get a comment on this problem that has existed for the majority of the year? For some of us, this is a significant problem hindering our experience.
I experienced it too. It made the betas unenjoyable and when it was still happening on release it made me genuinely reconsider if I was going to enjoy playing this game. I know it’s not just a placebo effect, because it felt distinctly different for me going from playing on the final day of ow1 to the first day of ow2… literally like one day of downtime. Same deal with the betas.
I want to be clear I’m only talking about how it feels to aim, not hitreg, because some people are saying the hitreg feels bad/inconsistent and that’s a totally different issue than their aim feeling slow/floaty/inconsistent/worse than before.
Things I didn’t do/reasons I don’t buy into:
Lower your sensitivity by .01
There’s no way that’s perceptible unless your dpi is like 50000. A joke
“The game is just faster paced”
I have tons of reasons for not buying into this but the main one is that my aim went back to feeling completely normal in the span of one game.
Gameplay → High precision input
This should be an extremely niche usage setting, it shouldn’t be the cause of your pain. But if it fixes it for you, by all means.
Change any windows settings or mouse settings
That said, somehow I fixed it and I don’t know what exactly it was. I am pretty sure it was a combination of the following:
Force the game into borderless windowed → apply → force it into fullscreen.
Some games straight up lie about whether they’re in BW or FS. I don’t know why, but it’s common enough that it’s one of the first places I look when aim feels floaty or I’m experiencing screen tearing.
In most of those games, changing away from FS, applying, and going back usually fixes it.
I don’t know if this is actually a problem with OW2 yet but it’s something I’m gonna keep an eye on now.
Under graphics quality, change high quality upsampling from “default” to “AMD FSR” → raise sharpness to around 20%.
OW2 felt really blurry to me, which in return made it harder to foucs on aim. It makes reading the outlines a lot easier with this on.
You don’t need an AMD card
If you run the game fine, set render scale to “custom” and then “100%”. By default it will dynamically lower your render scale to increase performance. I think it might raise your render scale too if you far exceed your target fps but I’m not sure.
I’m guessing it impacts input latency, and also make things appear blurry sometimes
I’m not sure if the “Reduce Buffering” bug has ever been fixed, but if you alt tab frequently, it doesn’t hurt to continue the habit of turning RB off- > applying → turning it back on.
I made my crosshair smaller.
This one might actually be me just gaslighting myself, but it felt bigger than it used to be. IDK. Big crosshairs make my aim really bad.
After doing a bunch of stuff to the settings (which I’m pretty sure was just that), it feels normal again. Anything else I’m (mostly) confident is down to hitreg just feeling different due to new audio, new bullet vfx, new feedback, etc. Literally went from not being able to hit the side of a barn over the span of a few games, to actually clicking heads again. I doubt it’ll work for everyone though and it’s unfortunate it’s still happening to so many players
Thanks for your post, my dude. Really appreciate all this info. I’ve tried most of this stuff already but not all of it, so I’ll test now.
It definitely has nothing to do with hitreg or the game’s faster pace as some have suggested. I can very clearly feel the increased input latency merely by tracking bots in the training range, without even actually firing. It’s bad enough that if it’s not resolved, I see myself limiting my time with OW2 after season 1 and would certainly never try comp.
I had this a lot in the beta as well, it SEEMED better to me but it’s really hard to gauge and I haven’t been playing much hs anyways…but yeah if it’s still happening they need to fix this asap.
Do you happen to know if you have dynamic render scale enabled? Some people on another thread said turning it off helped a lot and I’m trying to get an idea of whether that was actually a possibility or not.
Yeah except he’s right for once.
This has been an issue for all the betas and they still haven’t fixed it. I don’t know how it happens or if people just aren’t noticing it but it makes the game feel unplayable. My accuracy in the betas was down by like 20% because of it, and no I never adjusted (I thought I would eventually) it just feels like something is significantly wrong.
Playing the newer heroes a lot recently, so I don’t notice too many issues, but recently tried to get back into play Soldier and there’s definitely something weird going on here. Where my shots should be hitting something, but aren’t.
In fact, I get the same feeling with Kiriko’s projectiles too.
The crosshairs being huge liars in Overwatch is nothing new, but I really wish they fixed this by now.
Heck, I remember when the first comments they made about OW2’s improvements was that OW1’s gunplay was bad and they tried to make a renewed effort on improving that; and it still feels bad.
I have it off, though I also tested with it on to see if it made a difference. I tried a few different configurations with automatic and custom settings. Didn’t make a difference for me sadly.
It breaks my heart to say this, but I feel the exact same way. The other option is to find a new main, but no other heroes give me the same sense of satisfaction and enjoyment as my main does, but I just cannot maintain the same level I used to play at with this issue. I had really, really hoped this would get fixed upon release. I can deal with the crappy visual clutter and the diminished fun of 5v5 and the horrible new sounds, those are just whatever, but the aim thing is just game breaking for me. I’m not enjoying the game as much anymore because of it. I’m heartbroken.
I’m so sorry. Ana I assume? I only tried her once and it was so hard to hit anything. I knew I was letting the team down and it was demoralizing, so I haven’t played her since. Bap felt like piss too, but at least his healing is easy.
Tracer feels so awful that I only use her for testing, since she’s the hero I’m most familiar with. The input latency is actually far more impactful to my performance than the damage nerf.
I’m going to find new mains myself, at least for the time being. Probably JQ and Brig, though even Brig feels slow and unresponsive compared to OW1 (despite that I vastly prefer her OW2 kit).
I’ve tried that and it didn’t work for me personally, but others have had luck with it. Everyone should at least give it a try. This is all just so damn weird.
Same here. I cant aim. I cant track. Went from 55+ acc to below 30 some times. The game is fun, but unplayable. And we are not getting any response of this problem yet. And, for the first time, kephri is right. The sensitivity is waaaay off.
I had issues with aim in beta, but everything feels super smooth now. It’s possible that your fps is different than it was in ow 1. That effects input lag and how smooth things will feel.
Ohh good call. Zarya’s thicc beam helps a lot. I’ll try Sym too. I tried Mei but her icicle is just impossible for me right now.
Dude, I was finally hitting 55 to 58% Tracer acc without using tanks to pad the stat. I worked so hard for that. Experimented with 9 different mousepads and 4 mice, used 4K polling and 240 Hz, and spent well over 1,000 hours just in the training range alone to practice various tracking techniques I would bring into matches.
It’s all gone. I can barely keep my crosshair on a tank. I’m shooting in the 30s. The last 5 years of progress…gone. If there were a solid alternative to OW on the market, I’d uninstall and go there, but there really isn’t.
