In competitive e-sports shooters, the slightest edge can be the difference between winning and losing. While improving your skills takes time, fixing your settings is the first step.
Valorant’s ranked games are pretty much as high stakes as it gets. With players of similar skill level battling, you will need every advantage you can get if you want to win.
Here, we take a look at the best settings you can change that can help you whilst you play.
Best Mouse Settings
Let’s dive into ensuring you’ve got the best mouse settings, but we should also mention your keyboard. Simply put, use key binds that you find comfortable. As long as you are easily able to reach all of the important keys without significantly moving your hand, you should be fine.
The mouse has two significant aspects of performance. The sensitivity and the hardware.
Mouse Sensitivity
Always use a sensitivity that you feel comfortable with. However, a mistake that a lot of new players make is setting their sensitivity too high.
This does not allow you to make macro adjustments and makes you less accurate. A great rule of thumb used in most competitive games is that a full swipe of your mouse hand should turn you 180-degrees.
The scope sensitivity is essentially how fast your aim moves when scoped in relation to the speed at which you move normally. Unless you are coming from another game where you used a lower scope sensitivity, you should leave this at 1.00.
There are also online tools to convert your sensitivity from existing games. If you need a simpler solution, CS:GO players can divide their sensitivity by 3.181818, and Overwatch players can divide their sensitivity by 10.6.
Mouse Hardware & Other Settings
A gaming mouse can make a huge impact on how well you play. Gaming mice have better reporting rates (1ms) than standard mice (~8ms).
This means there is less input lag when you aim. They are also designed in an ergonomic manner to provide you maximum grip and comfort for long gaming sessions. They use advanced sensors for maximum accuracy.
However, it is important to remember that the DPI setting in a gaming mouse is nothing more than a marketing tool. The only difference between 400 and 1200 DPI is that your mouse moves much faster. In fact, most professionals use 400 or 800 DPI.
Lastly, remember to turn off mouse acceleration in your settings. This can be done by going to Control Panel>Mouse>Pointer Options and unchecking ‘Enhance Pointer Precision’. This will allow for a more consistent aiming experience.
Best Control Settings
There are also other settings that you can alter to better your Valorant experience. A simple tip for competitive players is to turn off music and Agent Flavor. Both of these settings are distracting and will only hinder your ability to perform.
Apart from this, there are two main things that you need to consider. Your crosshair and your minimap.
Crosshair Settings
A crosshair can be down to personal preference. However, here are a few pointers that you should always adhere to:
- Have maximum brightness for optimal visibility.
- Make sure your crosshair outline does not obscure your vision.
- Make sure your crosshair is static.
Newer players might be wondering why the crosshair should be static and not dynamic. This is because once you are acquainted with how the movement works in the game, you will always know how accurate you are.
At that point, a dynamic crosshair will only cause distractions and may even obscure important elements of the game.
The crosshair is definitely a preference thing. But of course, you want a crosshair that doesn’t block your vision too much.
You also want the crosshair as precise as possible to hit those consistent headshots. There really isn’t a best crosshair, but I suggest copying a crosshair from professional players or streamers like TenZ, nAts, Tarik, or JessieVash.
Minimap Settings
The default minimap settings for Valorant are quite bad. They do not let you properly see what is happening in the map, thus affecting your decision making. The following map settings should help you clearly see a large portion of the map.
- Keep Player Centered: Off
- Rotate: Rotate
- Minimap Vision Cones: On
- Minimap Size: 0.8
- Minimap Zoom: 0.6
Having a rotating map should make it easier for you to acquire information at a glance. However, this is a personal preference along with the ‘Keep Player Centered’ option.
All of the other settings should be similar to ours as they will help you quickly make out where everyone is on the map.
We just went through some of the best Valorant settings. These settings will help new players get started in a proper manner by making sure they are not at a disadvantage due to the way they have calibrated Valorant.
As you become more experienced, you will be able to tweak these settings yourself to serve your play style better.
