Crosshair and Sensitivity: Building a Setup You Stop Second-Guessing
There is no correct sensitivity and no correct crosshair. There is only a setup you have used long enough for your hands to stop guessing — and that is worth more than any specific number.
eDPI: the only sensitivity number worth comparing
Comparing raw in-game sensitivity between players is meaningless because it depends on mouse DPI. The comparable number is eDPI:
eDPI = mouse DPI × in-game sensitivity
800 DPI at 0.35 sensitivity = 280 eDPI. 1600 DPI at 0.175 = the same 280 eDPI and the same physical hand movement.
Valorant players run low compared to most shooters. The bulk of competitive players sit somewhere in the 200–400 eDPI band, and the professional average sits nearer the middle of it. That is not an accident — Valorant rewards precise standing shots and punishes overshooting more than it rewards fast turns.
| eDPI | Style | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| < 200 | Very low | Excellent micro-precision. You need a large desk and full arm movement to turn. |
| 200–280 | Low | The most common competitive band. Stable one-taps, comfortable spray control. |
| 280–400 | Medium | Faster reactions to flanks, slightly noisier micro-adjustments. |
| > 400 | High | Great for close-range chaos and Raze/Neon movement. Long-range taps get inconsistent. |
Translating eDPI into desk space
eDPI is abstract. cm/360 — how many centimetres of mousepad a full 360-degree turn takes — is not. Valorant turns roughly 0.07 degrees per mouse count at sensitivity 1.0, which gives a clean approximation:
cm/360 ≈ 13,060 ÷ eDPI
So 280 eDPI is about 47 cm per full turn. 400 eDPI is about 33 cm. 200 eDPI is about 65 cm.
Now measure your actual usable mousepad space. If a full turn needs 47 cm and you have 35 cm of pad before your hand hits the keyboard, you will physically be unable to turn and check a flank. That is a real problem no amount of practice fixes. Pick a sensitivity your desk can support.
How to actually choose, once
- Set your mouse DPI to 800 and leave it there forever. It is the safe default, it is what most guides assume, and changing it later invalidates every sensitivity you have ever tried.
- Start at 0.35 in-game (280 eDPI). This is squarely in the normal band.
- Do the wall test. In the range, pick a spot on a wall. Flick to it fifty times from a resting position. If you consistently overshoot, go down 0.05. If you consistently undershoot or run out of pad, go up 0.05.
- Play twenty games at whatever you land on. Not two. Twenty.
- Then stop. This is the actual hard part.
Muscle memory takes weeks to build and about ten minutes to destroy. A player who changes sensitivity every time they have a bad session never accumulates any. If you have changed yours more than twice in the last month, that alone is likely worth a full rank — not because your current number is wrong, but because you have never given any number time to become automatic.
Scoped sensitivity and Windows settings
- Leave scoped sensitivity at 1. This makes your scoped aim scale consistently with your hip aim. Changing it means learning two separate muscle memories.
- Windows pointer speed must be at 6/11 (the exact middle notch). Any other setting applies acceleration-like scaling before the game ever sees your input.
- Turn off "Enhance pointer precision." It is mouse acceleration under a friendly name, and it makes identical hand movements produce different in-game turns.
- Set your mouse polling rate to 1000 Hz if the hardware supports it.
Building a crosshair that helps
A crosshair has one job: tell you exactly where the bullet goes, without covering the thing you are shooting at. Almost every bad crosshair fails at the second half.
The principles
- Thin over thick. Thickness 1 is enough. Thick lines cover heads at range, which is precisely when you need to see them.
- Small gap, or none. A large centre gap makes the exact aim point ambiguous. Many strong players use a gap of 0 or a centre dot.
- Short lines. Length 2–4 is plenty. Long lines are visual noise and cover more of the screen.
- High-contrast colour. Cyan, green and yellow read clearly against almost every Valorant map. Red and white disappear against certain walls and against blood.
- Outlines on, opacity high. An outline keeps the crosshair readable over bright and dark backgrounds alike.
- Turn off movement and firing error. The dynamic expansion is a distraction, not information — you should already know whether you are moving.
A sane starting point
Thin cyan cross, thickness 1, length 3, gap 2, outline on at low opacity, no dynamic error. Then adjust one parameter at a time and give each version a few games. If you cannot articulate what problem a change solves, do not make it.
FragLy has a searchable database of real professional crosshair codes if you want a tested starting point rather than building from scratch — open the tracker and use the Crosshairs tool.
An oversized crosshair genuinely lowers headshot percentage, because the centre becomes a region rather than a point and your placement drifts down towards the chest. If your HS% is stuck under 18%, shrinking your crosshair is a cheaper experiment than an hour of aim training.
What sensitivity does not fix
Players change sensitivity because they lost a duel and it feels like a mechanical failure. Usually it was not. The three things that look like sensitivity problems and are not:
- Missing while moving. Valorant applies heavy accuracy penalties to shooting while running. No sensitivity fixes this — stopping does.
- Losing fights you peeked into. If you die before your crosshair settles, the problem was the peek, not the turn speed. See the entry guide.
- Spraying off target. Spray control is a recoil pattern you learn, not a sensitivity you tune.
Test the change with real numbers
After twenty games on a new setup, pull your stats on FragLy and compare headshot percentage and ADR against the twenty before it. Real match data beats "it feels better" — feelings are heavily biased by whether you just won.
Search your Riot ID →The short version
Run 800 DPI, pick something in the 200–400 eDPI band, check that a full turn fits on your mousepad, then leave it alone for a month. Build a thin, high-contrast crosshair with a small gap and no dynamic error. The specific numbers matter far less than the consistency, and consistency is the one thing constant tinkering guarantees you will never have.
Written by the FragLy team. Benchmarks in this guide are rules of thumb drawn from competitive play, not official Riot figures — use your own tracked matches as the real reference point.