Here’s a little question for you. What do you think is the first thing that a new player would want to learn when they pick up their first TacFPS title, whether it be VALORANT, Counter Strike, or R6? This could be something like basic map callouts, how to peek correctly, or how to control the recoil of the guns, etcetera. But in my opinion, the first thing that a brand new TacFPS player should learn before tackling any of those other issues is crosshair placement.
The Importance of Crosshair Placement
Good crosshair placement in any FPS is useful and can give you the advantage in many situations, but in TacFPS it is absolutely crucial. Why?
Because in a game like CS where you can die very quickly to a single well-placed bullet, you need to make sure that you need to traverse the least amount of distance possible on your screen to shoot at your target. The ideal situation is when your crosshair is placed so well that you don’t even need to move the mouse to kill whoever appears on your screen.
When you look at today’s most prominent TacFPS professionals, you might notice that their crosshair placement is one of the strongest differences between them and an average player. Aiming in TacFPS is often downplayed due to how quick gunfights are and how crosshair placement tends to cut out the need for wider mouse movements. Players often doubt the effectiveness of aim trainers for these reasons. However, today we’re going to break down the most useful scenario type for TacFPS and show you how to play these maps correctly, providing an example of how you can get more value out of using the aim trainer.
What is Linear Clicking?
Looking closely at TacFPS mechanics, we recognize that it is often the first shot that counts the most when engaging in a gunfight. When isolating this in the aim trainer, we naturally go to scenarios featuring single-click-to-kill, moving targets. There’s tons of these in both Kovaak’s FPS Aim Trainer and Aimlabs, but scenarios with evasive targets like Dynamic Clicking don’t really look right for a game like Counter-Strike.
We need something a bit more simple, with movement patterns that conform to one axis and aren’t nearly as evasive.
There is a subcategory of aiming that fits the bill perfectly known as linear clicking, where you have targets moving in very readable, often straight, and often horizontal lines. The targets may also be much smaller to place a focus on timing your initial shot, which we stated as critical to your success in the gunfight.
When you play linear clicking scenarios, you want to imagine yourself in a position where we are being peeked by several targets at once or where we are holding multiple angles where targets might peek from.
Seems simple enough in principle, but many players still struggle with implementing the right technique in these scenarios and, more importantly, translating that technique into CS or VALORANT. In order to understand how to play them correctly and accomplish this translation, we need to address what is considered a very common sin within aiming.
Prediction
Prediction–it’s a flaw that we are all susceptible to. Often, in aiming, we become confident in the target’s movement patterns, so confident that we begin to take guesses on what the target is going to do next, without any visual cues or hints to be certain of it. It is one of the first errors that new aim trainers are taught to avoid doing. Don’t predict, just react.
Now, I’m not saying that this is bad advice. For almost any moving target scenario, prediction is bad, especially in tracking scenarios. However, in situations like linear clicking, where shot timing and accuracy are so important, I must introduce the leading shot.
This is where you attempt to flick to a position in the direct path of the target’s movement and wait until the target moves into your crosshair before you take the shot.
Now wait! Wait! Before you call me an aiming fraud and cancel me from the aiming community for teaching bad habits, please hear me out.
If you think about it, this is a good representation of how you’re going to play when someone peeks into an angle that you’re holding in VALORANT or CS. Your crosshair is ahead of where they’re going to be, or at least where you expect they are going to appear. Now, let’s talk a little bit deeper about crosshair placement.
A common piece of advice is place your crosshair on a slight offset away from the wall, not completely flush with it. But why? Well, if you hold your crosshair too close to the wall, called holding an angle tightly, you will run into problems with opponents peeking into you properly. They will be strafing into it, at high speed, not crouching or slow-walking, and that means that you will be forced to perform a micro adjustment away from the wall to reach them. This is even worse if the enemy wide swings you. This is the reason why the famous Poppin swing peek works so well. Okay, then why not hold super far out away from the wall? Well, then you are just fully predicting. If you place your crosshair very far away, the enemy might stop before they cross into it and have enough time to shoot at you, again forcing you to perform an adjustment, this time towards the wall.
For the regulars, this is crosshair placement 101, but the question we need to ask is, how do we actually practice this in the aim trainer? There are scenarios that feature targets peeking from behind walls, but these are not too popular and don’t give us that constant, visible action. But crosshair placement knowledge is also just leading shots 101.
Applying leading in-game
When your crosshair is positioned in front of a moving target’s path, it’s like you’re holding an angle. If you place too far away, the target might change direction or you might be simply wasting precious time. If you place too close, the target will pass through your crosshair, forcing you to micro, and it would’ve been better if you never attempted it. No, the key to linear clicking is to read the speed of the targets on the map, which can vary target by target, and find that right spot ahead of the target’s movement where you can time your click and barely need to move your mouse. Same idea as in VALORANT.
Despite having good crosshair placement, often a micro adjustment is still needed to reach the target. The catch is that you don’t want to start your micro correction chasing after the target. It is far easier to have confidence in your correction if you are already ahead of the target, not behind it. This is why a common issue beginner CS players suffer from is missing consecutive shots, all in pursuit of a single target.
This is what we refer to as trailing micro corrections, where you’re constantly trying to make up lost ground, taking shot after shot from behind the target’s strafe. Sometimes, these are inevitable, since you won’t always have the opportunity to lead your shot, but it’s therefore important that your micro is smooth and controlled. This is one of the defining factors of today’s professional Counter Strike superstar, Team Spirit’s donk, who never fails to narrow his motions down to small, decisive micros. This is what makes him so incredibly accurate and consistent in his performances.
When to lead shots
Another thing to remember is that leading shots is somewhat of a risky gamble. Even if you have the perceived opportunity to take one, it doesn’t mean you always should.
It’s best to interweave leading shots and well-performed micros together, depending on what helps your shot pacing the most during the run.
It also helps in general to give yourself practice with both situations, where you can safely preaim your targets or micro adjust where needed. You will see this most often when I play linear clicking– a good balance of leading shots and traditional dynamic technique. If you want a good overview of how to perform really strong micro corrections, I recommend studying Cartoon’s aim training. He is arguably the strongest micro aimer of all time.
Scenario Suggestions
The main scenario that sparked the creation of this new subcategory is Floating Heads Timing. This is a map featuring really small targets that move strictly horizontally at varied elevations. It has everything that we want for a linear clicking scenario. Predictability, a focus on timing your shot, lots of angles to manage, and accuracy-scored. It’s a fundamental scenario that, in my opinion, should find a spot in every TacFPS routine.
Other scenarios include
- VoxTS click
- Frogshot
- BeanClick
- 1w2ts Pasu
If you want to find really good scenarios that focus directly on micro or linear clicking, I recommend checking out Cartoon’s Twitch streams, where he explores and pushes scores on some obscure maps made by Kovaak’s scenario creator Etherel, most of which are VALORANT-focused. On all of these maps I recommend trying to take leading shots where the opportunity presents itself and learning how to use peripheral vision to your advantage in searching for viable targets.
With all of this said, I hope you guys can clearly understand the parallels between this category and clicking situations in TacFPS games. While the isolated representation in the aim trainer isn’t exactly one-to-one, with targets peeking out from behind walls as we said earlier, the translation is still there, undeniably. And this is a really wide translation, which is why it makes sense to me why linear clicking was deemed a necessary separation from dynamic clicking as a whole. With an analytical eye, you can find potential in-game translations everywhere in the aim trainer. If you guys want to see more breakdowns of scenario types in this style, let me know in the comments. Follow my Twitch if you want to see some live Kovaak’s gameplay or analysis. As always, happy dot clicking!