Within a tactical shooter like VALORANT, it is in your favor to be quicker and smarter than your opponent. For ease of these two elements comes down to where your crosshair is at any given moment. This guide will teach you the whats and the hows to take advantage of crosshair placement and outperform your opponent.
Many players tend to rely on raw aim because of the perception that aim is what wins duels, but there is a more efficient way to tap heads that is crosshair placement. Through crosshair placement, you open more opportunities for yourself that go beyond what aim can, which includes reaction time, holding angles, and overall improvement of map awareness.
This guide will explain the relationship between crosshair placement and VALORANT’s diverse maps, integrating it within critical moments versus your opponent. With a more reliable method to outperform your opponent, not only do you save yourself time grinding for god aim, but you have equally as much impact and become a more flexible player.
Simply put, the crosshair determines where your bullets shoot.
Although being a few mere pixels at the center of your screen, it is the most critical of your user interface. Where it goes, your bullets go, and you want your bullets to hit an opponent. Your likelihood of a headshot will increase if you aim at where the head will be. Obvious enough, but it is easy to overlook in the heat of the moment. You want to utilize this game-changer to its fullest potential consistently throughout your games.
To do that, it helps to learn the maps and general placement indicators.
There are many intricate details that go into map design. Elevation, corners, and whatnot. You must be aware of all these elements and adjust your crosshair accordingly. If you want to aim at an opponent’s head, you need to place your crosshair where you think it will be.
But what if there is an easier way to predict where heads are?
If you observe the maps, there are sections where the walls are split in half horizontally or have geometric shapes that are distinct in color or symmetry.
Ascent A lobby (top) and Split B site (bottom)
When an opponent stands by it, their heads align with these distinct lines. It goes for the crates as well, in which the top of the crates aligns with the head.
Ascent Mid Catwalk (top) and Split A Tower (bottom)
Although there are special situations where this may be unreliable, such as the opponent crouching or unusual positioning, it’s about maximizing your chances of having the advantage over them. It’s helpful to use this rule of thumb because it’s more common they have a normal position. In other words, it’s predicting the most probable. You may practice this concept in game modes such as Deathmatch or Customs.
Now with the basics of crosshair placement, let’s dive into what advantages it offers.
You and your opponent have one thing in common: you are both humans. Considering it is unrealistic for humans to have impeccable reaction time, you want to just be quicker than your opponent. The most advantageous way to do so is having your crosshair on your opponent’s head first.
With minimum cursor movement, you can win duels just as well, if not easier with correct crosshair placement. If positioned correctly, your opponent will walk into your crosshair and all you need to do is click your fire button to hit them.
The key is anticipation. Because you predict your opponent moving into your crosshair, you initiate a response — in this case, to shoot — quicker than if you were to react to your opponent appearing within your line of sight.
A common tactic in VALORANT is holding angles, whether it be defense or offense. Holding angles is watching any point at which your opponent can come through. As previously mentioned, you will have an advantage over your opponent with your crosshair on them first. In other words, pre-aiming. Thus, take into consideration player movement in terms of peeking.
When players peek a corner, they cannot see anything beyond until half or so of their body is away from the wall. This means that you, the player holding that angle, will see them first whether it be the tip of the gun or their shoulder. Your opponent knows this, so to even have a chance at winning the duel, they will have to step out further from the wall to take the shot.
(Note: Consider that your opponent may have abilities to clear corners, such as flashes or drones.)
Your crosshair should be a few inches from the wall. Not only will your opponent most likely walk right into your line of aim, but it also gives you a bigger time frame to react. If you were to place your crosshair right at the corner, you gamble your odds of reacting right away at the mere pixels of your opponent, not including that they may jiggle or jump peek.
Make it easier for yourself. Give yourself a bigger window of opportunity to work with rather than error.
This is very much the opposite of holding angles, but with the same concept.
Clearing corners means to peek and to peek accounts for the risk of getting shot by the enemy team. When you peek corners, you would want to pre-aim at their head level.
This won’t guarantee a kill, but it increases your chances of getting one. And your chances will increase ever so when aiming at the area that is a one-tap kill — the head. Aiming anywhere else, like the torso, will kill your opponent too slow, and your opponent may have already shot your head in the span of what it takes to put bullets into their torso.
However, there are exceptions in which the head is not always the best target you want your crosshair on:
The Operator is a sniper rifle that has the potential of killing players with one bullet. Other than the legs, the Operator can one-shot through max shield and health by the head (255 damage) or the torso (150 damage). Because the head and torso have just as equal of an opportunity to be one-shot, it is in your favor to aim at the body because the head is too small of a target for a gun that has a slow fire rate of 0.6 rounds/sec.
For crosshair placement, you would aim lower than usual to level at where your opponent’s torso will be.
Shotguns include the Shorty, Bucky, and Judge. When shot, the bullets of shotguns spread, so they are not precise to your crosshair. Hence, it may be futile to aim at your opponent’s head with a shotgun because the bullets spread too far, and the head is only so small.
Therefore, you should place your crosshair at your opponent’s torso to maximize the potential of each bullet hitting them.
Crosshair placement is not the ticket to instant wins, but it’ll help you improve yourself as a flexible player as you navigate and familiarize yourself with the maps and adapt to any situation with your intuition of where to aim. But, like many aspects of the game, intuition is not without experience, so apply the basics of crosshair placement as much as you can to build up the instinct.
Maximize your advantages, widen your opportunities, and, most importantly, make it easy on yourself. Play smart, play efficiently, and play to your best ability!
