So I’m playing lifeweaver in aim arena right he actually does really decent damage, but whenever I tried to track someone it was even straifing that messed me up it’s if they simply kept moving in the same direction.
If they just walked right (from my pov) and held right even if my crosshair was directly on them my throns wouldn’t hit what do I do in situations like that?
Even the console aim assist dosen’t help.
Do I stop shooting and try and get my cross hair infront of the path there going? If there going right do I just shoot even more to the right? What about my leap can I implement that to give me a edge?
Projectiles are like bullets IRL - they travel at specific speeds so you need to shoot where they are going instead of just placing the crosshair on the enemy
Depending on the projectile speed, you may need to compensate more than others for travel time (firing Sym’s orb or Rein’s firestrike, for example)
LW fires a flurry of bullets so at first it may look a bit like Soldier but if you could see it from the side, you would see a snake of projectiles making their way to wherever you shot. So definitely place it ahead of their path instead of right on them (at further distances, anyway)
Exactly - farther they are, the more you have to compensate! (though don’t expect players to just eat all of your rounds)
You have to quickly adjust if you are finding they are moving out of your shots. You have to predict their movement, sometimes this can mean leading them into your next round of shots, moving your cursor to adjust as you are shooting, etc.
I like to practice with Mercy / Zen personally since I enjoy playing both of them, but helps with other characters too.
Edit: The nice thing about projectiles is even though they can be harder to land reliably, no fall off damage is nice.
(Distance to Target) / (Projectile Velocity) = (Time to Target)
Aim for where the target will be (Time to Target) seconds after your shot is fired. You can practice to get a good feel for how much you need to lead in certain situations, but if the enemy is moving erratically, prediction becomes a significant factor.
Because you need to lead projectiles and Aim Assist actively tries to make it difficult to aim away from a hitbox, you will probably find that it’s easier to play projectile characters with a little weaker aim assist than you use with hitscan characters.
As an aside, projectiles in Overwatch are significantly slower than even relatively slow pistol rounds. Most modern pistol rounds are slightly supersonic (over 343 meters per second), and the slowest common pistol load is oldschool 230 grain ammo for .45 ACP at about 250 m/s. Modern rifle rounds are generally at least 790 m/s.
I don’t know Lifeweaver’s projectile velocity off hand; Mercy’s pistol is 50 m/s, Hanzo’s bow I think is 100 m/s, Kiriko and Orisa primary are 90 m/s.
Hitscan: Hitscan means that bullets doesn’t have a travel speed and (assuming you have a good PC) if your crosshair is on the enemy while you shoot them you’ll hit them.
Projectile: projectile means that your bullets has a travel speed. This means that you have to put your crosshair where you think the enemy will be in the future. As you would guess projectile is RNG to a much greater extent at further ranges since the enemy can dodge some bullets by strafing.
The further away you shoot a target, the less your weapon accuracy will be with projectile heroes for this reason.
Sometimes you will hit lucky shots and some other times you will not. However what’s important is your overall average performance with projectiles.
To be fair, bullets are like the speed of sound, right? They should be functionally hitscan if actually shooting someone, at least I think so.
To the OP, LW has a very slow moving projectile. If you put your crosshair right on people, you’ll notice that the thorns lag behind a lot. So if you can figure out how much they lag behind, place your crosshair that much ahead of them. Do keep in mind that LW is only actually accurate when right next to someone. You won’t hit more than 30% far away, that’s not even possible.
Rifles under 50m or pistols under 25m are going to be pretty close to hitscan, but not quite. Roughly, 0.0625 seconds to target.
A running human manage 15 mph, which is 6.706 m/s. So that means they could move about 0.42m, wide enough that you would need to account for it, particularly for headshots (this is rounded up slightly to 800m/s for the rifle at 50m and uses a slightly generous 400m/s for the pistol round, just because at half distance, half velocity means same time to target).
It matters more in the real world in particular because engagements can commonly take place at 100m or several hundred. Once you get out that far, drag will have a meaningful impact on velocities (pistols will rarely be used for anything over 25m, 50m tops, though in principle they can hit further out, it’s just hard from a standing position). Some of the long range sniping can exceed 1610m, which leads to a rather significant time in the air.