Welcome to the guide on how to improve your aim.
This guide will help you improve your aim, which will in turn improve your ability while playing and help you win many gun fights.

I hope that this guide sees you off well into earning a better understanding towards playing Dirty Bomb.

Before understanding anything else, you need to understand how to perform well off what you should already know.

While movement is simple to grasp, there are certain things you should come to realize while playing the game and things that you should take into account while playing to give yourself an advantage over a player who doesn't realize these things.

Here are some basic movement tips before moving onto the other things you should already know:

• Do not sprint around corners. If you are sprinting and run into an enemy, you are forced to take a moment and ready your gun before being able to fire it. This can lose you a gun fight very easily
  
• Try not to run in a straight line unless it is absolutely safe to do so
  
• Always be on the move if you're inside or close to an enemy position

Long Jumping is a game mechanic in Dirty Bomb. It allows you to jump further much more quickly without any penalty.
To long jump, you must be sprinting. While sprinting, press the crouch and jump button at the same time. You will be flung forwards.

Long Jumping is useful for:

• Getting to combat areas much more quickly
  
• Gaining more forward momentum for any wall-jumps you perform
  
• Flinging yourself past an enemy to gain an upper hand in a gun fight
  
• Flinging yourself toward teammates much more quickly to assist them
  
• Long jumping allows you to throw health packs and ammo packs further than usual

Alongside Long-Jumping, there is a Wall-Jumping mechanic inside Dirty Bomb. You can jump off the side of any wall in the game. You are allowed two wall-jumps before you must return to the ground so you may be able to bounce off more walls.

Wall-Jumping can help you with many aspects of the game. These are the useful interactions with Wall-Jumping:

• Can be used in tandem with a long-jump to push yourself even further than a normal long-jump.
  
• Can be used to escape gun fights by forcing your enemy to adjust their aim to find you
  
• Can be used to access many shortcuts presented to you inside the maps
  
• Can be used inside of a gun fight against an enemy who cannot aim that well

In short, you should always be moving, unless you're taking a sniper shot.

Next up, we move on to aiming.

This sounds like an easy concept to grasp, right? Aiming just requires you to know how to put your mouse on the enemy and shoot, correct? Well, that's both right and wrong. Aiming is much more than pointing your crosshair on an enemy and hoping for the best. A good player has it ingrained into their mind that aiming is much more than just pointing at the enemy. They know how they should have their mouse positioned before even seeing an enemy. I'll explain that to you here.

Your sensitivity plays a huge role in your ability to aim. If you have a high sensitivity, you may notice in your gun fights that sometimes your mouse tends to move off target, causing you to lose your gun fight and in turn it lets your team down. The best way to be accurate, in fact, is to not move your mouse that much. While that is possible using a high sensitivity, it can be a bad idea to rely on your ability to keep your hand from moving too much in a gun fight.

Lower your sensitivity

Many players think like this, "The higher my sensitivity, the faster I can react!" That is the wrong way to think about aiming. You should understand that you shouldn't be reacting by dragging your mouse across the screen to shoot an enemy that's just come into your view, unless they came from a position that you were not looking at. I will extrapolate on this in a bit.

To start, you should adjust your windows mouse settings. You can do this by going to the Control Panel > Mouse > Pointer Options Tab -- and applying these settings.

• Place mouse slider bar in the middle (6 ticks from the left)
  
• Untick Enhance Pointer Precision

It should look like this:


You should lower your mouse DPI/CPI if possible. The lower your DPI/CPI, the less chance your mouse will make random movements or adjustments based on the smallest movements of your hand. I use a CPI of 400, which means when I am in a gunfight, I almost never miss unless spread gets the better of me.
Find something comfortable for you to use. Most players would tend to go with 800DPI/CPI, and even 1000 is just fine.

Next, you want to adjust your in-game sensitivity. The default of 10 is much too high for you to use effectively. Lower your sensitivity until you can find something that seems more manageable to use. I would suggest something in mid-ranges. 5-7 is a good starting point.

So, to wrap up this bit of information, you should follow these steps:

• Adjust your windows mouse settings - Control Panel > Mouse > Pointer Options Tab
  
  • Place mouse slider bar in the middle (6 ticks from the left)
    
  • Untick Enhance Pointer Precision
• Lower your mouse DPI/CPI if possible
  
  • A value under 800 is optimal
• Change your in game sensitivity
  
  • A value under 6 is optimal

Remember when I wrote -- Many players think like this, "The higher my sensitivity, the faster I can react!" I'll explain why this is a wrong line of thinking.

When playing shooter games, the uninformed understanding of the average player is that they should use a high sensitivity to react to threats that come across them while playing. I've already explained why a high sensitivity can be detrimental to your ability while playing. I'll now explain why - in depth - a higher sensitivity is not beneficial.

In a game like Dirty Bomb (in any First Person Shooter game), reaction time is key to winning a gun fight. The less time you're required to react in gives you a higher chance of winning said gun fight. My first tip for players looking to improve their reaction time is:

Stop aiming at the ground

While that sounds extremely simple to perform, it's a huge word of advice to every player who doesn't understand why some players can be so quick to shoot them (which leads to hackusations). I'll expand on this:

The absolute best way to improve your aim is these two simple things:

• Keep your crosshair at head level
  
• Never place your crosshair at the middle of a wall

Head Level
Keeping your crosshair at head level sounds like an easy thing, but it is something you must practice every time you play before it becomes a second nature to your aiming ability. The benefit of keeping your crosshair at head level means that you will almost always be scoring an easy headshot onto your enemy whenever you engage them in a fight. Headshots do extra damage to players, so landing successive headshots means that you can win your gun fights much more quickly, granted you land those shots.

Example of poor aim:

This is how most players tend to aim while playing. Aiming like this forces you to adjust your mouse towards an enemy before you're able to land any shots on them.

Example of good aim (aiming at head level):

This allows you - as I've stated above - to land headshots without adjusting your mouse.

Aiming at Corners
This is what I meant when I said 'Never place your crosshair at the middle of a wall'. This is highly important to being able to react quickly to an enemy. Aim at an open area where enemy players can come from. If you aim at the middle of a wall, you will be forced to move your mouse when an enemy comes from the position you should be looking at. What this means is that you will have squandered precious milliseconds in which you could have already fired off a couple of shots and done damage to a player just coming around the corner.

The picture of good aim is how you should be aiming, but you may not understand what I mean by the above paragraph. Here is a set of images explaining what I mean.

Poor aim:

Here you can that the crosshair is out in the open with no enemies in sight. If an enemy were to come from the left or right, you would be forced to react instead of simply being able to shoot as you see them pop up.

Good aim:



In these 3 screenshots, you can see that the crosshair placed at head level and watching an area of importance. If an enemy were to appear from any of these 3 locations, you would be able to ring out shots without having to adjust your mouse and land important shots required to winning a gun fight.

Here are a few extra tidbits of information regarding aiming:

• Jumping while in a firefight increases your weapon's spread, making it extremely hard for you to land shots as your accuracy will be all over the place
  
• A player who employs the above jumping technique in a gun fight makes them extremely easy for you to follow and shoot. They sacrifice their accuracy and give it all to you by making themselves easier to shoot
  
• These skills transfer over to other shooter games that you may play now or in the future. It will always give you a distinct advantage

Next, I'll move on to advanced movement.

Strafing is a technique which pertains to gun fights generally, but it's a common skill to have in your arsenal regardless of enemy presence or not. It keeps you mobile and prevents players from netting easy kills to your person.

Strafing is simply another term for moving side to side. Strafing in a gun fight can help you win over an enemy more often than if you were simply standing still and trying to engage. Strafing properly and being able to maintain aim, however, can be an issue.

To be effective in a gun fight, you should strafe. Here are some tips about strafing:

• Do not maintain a predictable pattern to your strafing while in a gun fight. Doing this allows your enemy to deal with you by knowing which direction you are going in
  
• To maintain your aim while strafing, lower your mouse sensitivity
  
• Strafing can be used while not in a gun fight to prevent enemies from landing easy shots on you when you least expect it
  
• If you're attempting to engage a sniper, strafe and dodge them while they are preparing a shot and shoot them while they are re-adjusting their shot.

Now this is a simple technique which can win you an insurmountable amount of gun fights. Understanding this technique and employing it at every opportunity will ensure you live longer and are able to react first.

This technique is also used in real life and can save your life there, if you ever come across a situation like that.

To slice the pie means to come around a corner at an angle, where you essentially have created a "pie slice". Doing this means that you will, in most cases, be able to see the target before they see you, allowing you net yourself a few hits on them before they engage you.

Here is how you should slice the pie:

• Approach the corner as close to the wall as you can
  
• Place your crosshair on the corner and use the apex of the corner as your pivot point.
  
• Push your self outwards and around the corner of the wall to come out at an angle
  
• Be sure to react accordingly to any threats as you come around the corner
  
• Point your crosshair at where you should be looking for an enemy. This will provide you ample time to react if required

Slicing the pie looks like this.

Before I leave you to your own devices to employ these techniques in your own time while you play, I just want to go on and give you a few extra bits of advice before you get in there and work on improving.

Many people look at others and ask, "How did they get so good at thing?"
The answer is simple, that person took the time to learn what they were doing and then practiced continually until they got it right. Once they got it right, they kept doing it until they can do it so well, people think they're way too good at what they're doing.
Practice is key.

If you're a player looking to improve, you can learn a lot from players who continually kick your ass. Instead of getting upset at them for killing you, take the down-time to understand why you died, what they did, and how you can stop that from happening again. Getting killed in a game like Dirty Bomb is a learning experience and you should learn from it. Figuring out what you can do better next time is something that can help you out in the long run.

We all have faults somewhere in our abilities - be it slow aiming or becoming too emotional. The best way to deal with these things is to work on them to make sure that these weaknesses won't hinder you when it comes to playing. If it's something you're not able to improve, try your best to work around it, instead of trying to incorporate it into your playing ability.

The most important thing to note is to always have fun. Losing can be a big downer to most competitive-minded players, but that's just how things happen sometimes. You can't do everything and you can't win all the games you play, it's just a fact. Do your best, but don't stretch yourself thin. Focus on playing and doing well and you'll always have fun.