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> I have been practicing staying calm and patiently placing shots.
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> What is “Z-Strafing”?
Moving forward & backward in addition to left & right. It depends on the range & positioning, but it can force your opponent to have to move their right joystick in addition to the left stick. This becomes even more useful at higher ranks because more people are primarily relying on their left stick, which is significantly easier for them to do. There’s some decent youtube videos out there that might explain it a bit more.
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> > Constant pressure is what works better with burst-fire weapons like the BR and suppressor, but pistol is all about flicking & stopping. If you hold your stick at only 15% for that last little bit, the server just doesn’t seem to register shots properly no matter where your aimer is.
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> > Even if your aim ends up being slightly off-target, the server will register the shots much better if you go full-stop. Try it out and you will find that suddenly you are being rewarded with head-shots when it was clearly a body shot, whereas aiming “more accurately” with the “slow adjustment” style will often get you no registration at all, even when your aimer is directly on someone’s head.
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> > It’s actually quite frustrating because the network logic actually forces you to aim worse in order to hit your shots 
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> > > I have always played with constant “pressure” on the sticks but my strafe is what guides my aim. I only track opponents with my right stick if they are NOT strafing in front of me, in other words, if they are running away or across map.
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> > > Players have pretty creative strafing techniques in H5 that I’m not used to yet, but practice is likely to refine all aiming habits.
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> > The thing is that many of the “creative strafing” stuff just doesn’t work over the network. If someone is doing a “short strafe” really quickly, or crouching too quickly, the game will just decide to count any shots that are somewhat close to them as long as you don’t react to it. It’s only when people adjust their aiming to the spam nonesense that the strafe actually works, whereas simply ignoring it and continuing to not touch your right stick at all will easily get you a headshot even if it’s not over their head on your screen. It’s a mental game, the best thing you can do is just stay calm and play your game instead of reacting and playing into theirs. Once you get the hang of that, you just start to laugh anytime you see those spam strafes because it’s a joke that only throws off their own aiming. There’s still some things like Z-strafing that work pretty well, and mixing up short & long strafes, but battles are so short in H5 that they become much more situational. Positioning & getting the first shot start to matter more when both players can end the fight quickly.
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> > > why are you asking how to aim when you’re Onyx
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> > > Just keep doing what you’re doing brud. You’re good.
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> > What do you mean? Onyx is when differences in aiming mechanics begin, not end. I’ve been Onyx since the game came out but it’s night & day compared to where I used to be. I’ve been at 60% with the pistol after 100 games this slayer season, but my first onyx was barely 50%. And anyway, it’s head shot percentage that is the main differentiator for aim once you hit Onyx, and you need to use halotracker to see that properly. Looking at this stat, you quickly understand why many pros end games with only 45% accuracy despite being miles better than anyone else – because harder opponents are harder to hit, it’s imperative to understand how the game handles aiming mechanics once the game starts matching you against champions, otherwise you just drown as the game bouncers you back and forth between winning easily & then losing 50-20. The higher you get, the more every bit counts, and the more difficult it is to get a match that is balanced & fun. At higher ranks, minor advantages translate to significant differences in the scoreline.
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> Interesting reply. It almost seems like you’re saying strafing isn’t that important in the big scheme of things. So do you even strafe? What’s an example of creative but ineffective strafing and what constitutes an effective strafe?
It’s not that I don’t strafe, but rather that better movement means that you don’t need to as often. If you can predict the spawns, where your opponent will go and where you need to position yourself in order to land the first shot – then your only priority is to make sure you don’t choke and start missing – so any “strafing” at that point should be focused on the goal of aiming with the left stick (offensive) rather than to make the opponent miss (defensive). (Incidentally, “offensive strafing” tends to throw people off more than trying to be overly clever anyway, since you start to appear like a “mirror image” from their point of view, so they panic and move in a way that messes up their own accuracy). If your goal in a battle is to make the opponent miss then you’re already at a disadvantage – either through a lack of confidence in your shot or already being down a shot.
And even if you’re already down a shot, defensive strafing alone is more of a “last ditch effort” to regain the balance. A more effective way to regain a shot when you’re down in a battle is by using the geometry to peak shoot. And if you understand the sight-lines, you can make sure to traverse the map in a way that obscures your view from the opponents, so that they don’t see you coming until it’s too late & you already have an “escape path” set up in case things go badly. Seriously, just watch Frosty play to really see this in action – he pretty much invented the “aggressive but elusive” playstyle that dominated the pro scene for the past 3 years.
In a perfect world where everyone is around the same skill and on a good server or LAN, then strafing matters more – especially in objective games where you are forced to put yourself in bad positions… but most of the time, matchmaking degenerates into a game of “punish the weakest link.” So often, even if someone has the first shot on you, it’s more reliable to simply dip out & either find an easier target or approach from a different angle. With the geometry of the maps and movement of H5, it’s very easy to position yourself so that it’s difficult for your opponent to finish the fight, so they just end up waiting around & wasting time while wondering if you’ll ever come back – and that’s important when there’s a range of skill in a match, because you’re essentially racing to see who can kill the most noobs.
Inefffective is anything “spammy,” like the people who just bob up & down as fast as possible or flick left/right as fast as possible – the network delay just makes everything count as a headshot on them. In order for “spammy” tactics to work, they need to be mixed in with a regular/longer strafe, intermittently rather than exclusively… but again, with how short gun battles are in H5, there’s only so many things you can actually do in a single battle anyway, so it’s pretty situational anyway depending on the range & nearby geometry – again, positioning & movement takes precedent in most practical cases. Even when I face parties of champs, there’s usually 1 or 2 that have a pretty bad aim and can be abused by using movement to cut them off from the pack & serve as easy kills while their friends are wasting time huddling together and playing scared 