Short Beginners Guide How to Improve Aim

Introduction

Welcome to my Short Beginners Guide How to Improve Aim. While good strategic knowledge will certainly help you in the game, it might not matter if you are not able to kill anything because of your bad aim. To help you to conquer this weakness I have sat down and written this guide.

Content:
In the first chapter I will show you how to set up another crosshair. After that you will learn, how to form habits which will improve your game. In the last part of the tutorial, I will talk about ways to train aim with and without a partner.

Crosshair

This game allows you to select between different crosshairs in the workshop section. While I think that the standard crosshair is ok, it has also a lot of shortcomings. Due to this I would recommend you to change the standard crosshair to one of the many different ones available.

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How to download/install a new crossair?


Open steam. Move the mouse cursor over "Community" next to liberary and your profile. Select Workshop.



In the workshop search for Natural Selection 2. Click on the pop up or click the magnifying glass to search for the game.



In the Natural Selection 2 workshop search for "crosshair". Look thorugh the results and choose a crosshair.



After you have chosen your crosshair, click the green button to download it.



Start the game. In the menu select "mods".



A list of all the mods will pop up. Look for your crosshair. It should say "Suscribed: Yes" but it is not activated. To activate it click on the mod one time.



In the last step you need to click on "restart" to activate the mod in the game. (You might need to do this after every patch because all the mods will be deactivated to prevent crashes. )

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What is the "best" crosshair?
The best crosshair is the one which works best for you. Download a crosshair and try to play some rounds with it. If you feel comfortable, stick with it.

Stop Spaming

Do not spam attack when you are in an engagement. If you want to improve your aim, you will have to break this habit if you have developed it in other games. Think about it: If you spam, you are not in control.

To break the habit, I would advice you to only shoot when you think that you are on target. Do not worry that you might die a lot in the beginning. It will be worth it in the long run. This is also true for aliens: Only bite when you think that you are on target. Do not hold the left mouse key down!!

The moment you take back control of your aim, you will notice that you will play a lot more consistent and deal more damage to the other team.

Positioning

Another important factor which improves your aim is your position on the map.
Click on this example of a bad position and think about the reasons for it. After you have done so read my explanation next to the picture.


Why is the position bad?

First of all the player in this example has very little space to maneuver. Imagine that a skulk sits just behind the door. If he jumps at the marine, he will have very little time to react. Furthermore, the marine can be attacked from two sides at the same time. By setting yourself up for an bad engagement, you create pressure on yourself which will affect your aim

How could we improve that?

We need to create distance between you and the aliens. The bigger the distance between us and skulk, the more time we will have to aim at it. Look at this picture:



Here we have set ourselves up for success. We are covering a big hallway and we have nearly no obstacles blocking our line of sight. In addition to that, it is also harder to attack us directly from behind because we have our back to a wall.

(There is more to positioning but this should cover the most basic information of the concept.)

How to Train Aim

While all of the things mentioned above will help your aim, the single most important factor for improving your accuracy is practice. If you are serious about improving, you should play regulary.



There are may ways to practice; the first and most practiced method is to play a lot of public games. This method is very popular because you can easily hop in a game without needing to organize people. However, public play has it limits; at a certain point you will notice that you will face players which will dominate you. Even though you try hard, you might not be able to win against them. The reason for this is that you are used to the movement and behavior of generally worse players.


To deal with this you need to join a community which has a lot of better players than you (check the ensl.org for example). By playing with them, you will notice that you will get used to their behaviors and hit them better. Furthermore, you might have the chance to learn techniques and tricks from better players by copying what they do. This is the second training method.



The third training method relies on the training mode in the menu. Select the Explore mode and a map. Start the game. You need following cheats:

1. respawn (respawn where you died)
2. addbots 2 2 (Adds two bots to the alien team)
3. damage 0.5 (Reduces the damage by half)
4. speed (You can increase the speed. 1 is normal speed. 1.1 is slightly faster etc.)
5. give shotgun (you get a shotgun)

You can bind all these cheats to keys. For example by typing "bind F1 respawn". If you press F1 now you will respawn. I hope you get the idea.

To train join marines and walk to the hive. Spawn two bots for the alien team. Try to kill them but do not spam! Check if your crosshair is on target. Respawn if you die. If you notice that the training is too easy, reduce the damage and / or increase the speed sligthly. Repeat the process for around 10-15 minutes. Be aware that this training has severe limits because you are not playing against human players. If you have a friend who can activate cheats on a server, you can train with him. Fight each other for around 30 minutes. Switch sides after every 15 minutes. This can look like:

Last Words

I hope this guide was able to help you to become a better player.
Please do not feel down if you dont perform right now. Learn from your mistakes and show them what you are made of! If you found this guide useful or have further questions and critique please write it down in the comment section.

[Mark]

a new guide for NS2 is always good

[Tony Blessing]

Noice