As we’ll surely have some new players joining I wanted to take the opportunity to quickly go over some of the aim settings OW has to offer and what their impact is.
Hope this is of use!
I’ll refrain from providing my own settings. The purpose of this post is to help inform you in such a way that you can better find your own ideal settings.
I’ve tried to keep this brief and my explanations are based on reading/watching about OW controller settings since I started playing 5 years ago so I may better wrangle the beast!
AIM TECHNIQUES
Dual Zone:
With Dual Zone your analog has two sensitivity areas.
The “inner” radius covers about 90% of stick motion. In this zone you’re sensitivity will increase linearly, but it will be MUCH slower than your maximum sensitivity.
When you hit the final 10% of your stick range there will be a bear instantaneous ramp up to your set sensitivity.
Theoretically you get the best of both worlds here, accuracy and a high turn speed. I often think it tries to emulate mouse movement a little.
Exponential Ramp:
Not too much to say here. Your aim curve ramps up exponetially until you hit your maximum turn speed at 100% stick deflection. This curve will be very familiar to those coming from other shooters such as CoD.
Linear Ramp:
With this curve your sensitivty ramps up on a 1 to 1 curve or rather, funnily enough, linearly. So this would mean 30% stick deflection equates to 30% your turn speed.
This is a very useful aim style, but it has a MAJOR caveat. Because it is entirely 1:1 minimum stick deflection tends to deliver TOO much movement, particularly at higher sensitivities and small aim adjustments can be hard to make as a result.
Fortunately a solution to this problem was patched in to the game and that is “AIM EASE IN” which I’ll comment on directly below.
OTHER SETTINGS
Aim Ease In:
Some people think this equates to a Deadzone slider, but that’s not what this is. In fact, Overwatch has no deadzone slider, though is very much in need of one.
What this setting allows you to do is manually adjust the response curve of your chosen aim style.
Theoretically there’s not much need to apply this to Dual Zone or Exponential Ramp, though you could use it to alter these response curves if you really wanted to.
The setting is most useful for Linear Ramp. As Linear Ramp with 0 aim ease in often feels too unwieldly, bumping this settings helps soften the response curve and makes Linear Ramp feel much better to use.
I typically see values between 20-30 cited as being a good sweet spot, though you may want a higher value if you really crank your sensitivty.
A value of around 45 is basically reproducing Exponential Ramp.
I’ve sometimes seen it cited that a value of 60 feels a bit similar to the curve present in titles such as Titanfall and Apex.
Aim Assist:
This simply adjusts how sticky/powerful the AA feels. Overwatch has traditional AA slowdown when on/near targets as well as a little bit of rotational AA, both of which are adjusted simultaenously with this setting.
As of this posting, AA is currently disabled in crossplay lobbies.
Ranked is not impacted as there is currently no crossplay here.
Aim Assist Window Size:
Some people conceive of this as a setting that alters the size of an invisible bubble around enemy targets, but this is actually not how aim assist windows work.
The window is actually an invisible radius that begins at the dead centre of your reticle and radiates outwards from there. The bigger the AAW then the bigger this radius.
When character models enter this invisible radius AA is triggered.
This means there’s no AA scaling with distance so if you have AAW it’s going to feel like AA kicks in WAY earlier when aiming at distant targets compared to aiming at closer targets.
A value of 30 here mirrors other FPS games well, though of course experiment with preference.
Aim Assist Ease In:
OK. This one can get convulted to explain, but I’ll try to keep it clear and concise.
You’re essentially setting how intensenly AA kicks in when activated. A value of 0, when an enemy enters your AAW you’re getting 100% of AA right away.
At a value of 100 you’re making it so AA kicks in MUCH more gradually.
The best way to visualise this is by thinking of a heatmap being applied to your AAW.
With AAEI at 0 your AAW radius would be fully red as you’re getting the fully strength of AA right away.
With AAEI at 100 your AAW radius would be reddest at the very centre of your AAW, but woukd gradually fade out to orange, the yellow until it hit became fully green at the outside edge of your AAW circumfrence.
How much ease in you want in AA is completely preferential. You may vary it by hero a bit. For instance you may find a lot of ease in helps your play snipers a lot more effectively as the AA isn’t so storng that it’s a detrimentant to hitting headshots.
Aim Smoothing:
This one I’ve never seen an official explanation off, but really it seems to be a backwards way of altering aim acceleration.
At a setting of 0 the game will always give you maximum acceleration possible.
As you increase the value your input acceleration will be softened. As a result the game is milliseconds less responsive to your output, basically adding a little delay and movement correction in to your aim.
Higher values typically result in slightly slower turn when you change crosshair directions.
I personally am not a fan of this setting, particularly as I use Linear Ramp, though if you’re a fan of Dual Zone and really crank your sensitivity ther emay be some benefit derived from using smoothing.
Aim Assist Legacy Mode:
See this dev post for reference
Useful Links/Videos:
Aikable explains Aim Ease In:
Eternal Dahaka looks at curves/deadzones:
SIDE NOTE:
My own recent testing strongly suggests that Xbox has an innatetly larger deadzone than the one present in the Playstation version of the game.
This means the game can feel a little less responsive on Xbox.
As we’re not offered a DZ slider, there’s nothing to be done about this. I’ve raised a ticket with Blizz about this to see if more information can be gleamed.