Okay, just to be clear, you're terrible at this.

Well, eventually through trial and error, I figured out the simple reason why my aim was bad, and I used these four steps to fix it.

Now, whether it's multiplayer or Warzone, Call of Duty has one major thing that makes it different from similar games like Apex Legends or Fortnite, and that's really strong aim assists.

If you don't believe me, try these games out for yourself, and you'll be shooting circles around your opponents.

But even though aim assist is strong in Call of Duty, that doesn't necessarily mean that aiming is easy.

If you work a full-time job and can only play a few hours a week, your aim probably looks very different from a pro Call of Duty player.

But it's important to bring this up, that aim assist is very strong, because there are two types of aim that you need to know in Call of Duty.

That's passive and active aim.

Now, active aim is what most people think of when they think of aiming.

It's the act of moving your crosshair to a target, controlling recoil as the gun fires, and then tracking that opponent.

But here's the catch.

When aim assist is strong, active aim becomes much less important, because aim assist is helping you do all of the work.

Strong aim assist reduces the skill gap between the best and the worst players when it comes to active aim.

But passive aim is a whole different ballgame.

Let's look at an example.

If I'm this player here, and I want to push an enemy that I think may be hiding in this building, what would happen if this player decided to peek me?

Well, if this player is decent, I'm probably going to lose, because my crosshair is aimed at the ground, and I'm not going to get the first damage in the gunfight.

The goal of passive aim is to place our crosshair where we think enemies will be, so that we have to move our crosshair as little as possible to get on target.

This will give us the initial damage advantage in the gunfight, and we also get into the aim assist bubble around the enemy player that makes it easier to hit our shots.

Now, some people call passive aim your crosshair placement or centering, and you can get into the technical details of it all, but they're very similar for controller aiming.

For this video, I'll use these terms as if they're the same.

Passive aim, or centering, or whatever you want to call it might seem simple, but there's more to it.

What if we're pushing a building, and there's more than one entrance?

Where do we aim?

Well, that's going to depend on things like your minimap, or the sounds that you hear in your headset.

But the reality is, you need to be able to switch where you're aiming based on the information that you're getting from the game.

And what's really hard about this, is there is no aim assist in these situations.

You have to do all of the work yourself.

Nooo!

That's why passive aim is the most important aiming skill to work on in Call of Duty.

It's important because it will help us get the first shots in a gunfight, but it's also important because most players' aim sucks without aim assist.

There's a huge skill gap when it comes to passive aim, and there's not nearly as much when it comes to active aim.

This means you're going to get way more return on your time investment working on your passive aim, instead of your active aim if you're limited on time.

And if you can get your aim to be good without aim assist, you're going to be even better when you do have it in a gunfight.

And the first step to improving our passive aim is practicing our thumb control.

Now for thumb control, I'm going to go over two practice drills, and you can do these in plunder or in a custom match in multiplayer.

Oh, and if you're curious about what controller I'm using, I'm now partnered with Battle Beaver.

I've been wanting to work with them for a very long time because I think they have the best custom controllers out there in terms of performance.

They offer smart buttons for the triggers, the bumpers, the face buttons, and even the touch pads, and this converts the regular squishy buttons of a normal controller into mouse click buttons.

And this reduces the activation point so that the game will register your input sooner.

You can also replace the normal L3 and R3 buttons with a snap action switch, and that activates faster and is easier to press than the normal stock button.

Now the smart face buttons feel great when you press them, but if you don't play claw, you can also add back buttons to your controller, and there are a ton of different placement options that you can choose from so that you can grip your controller comfortably while you're playing and not worry about having to take your thumbs off the analog sticks.

This is a major reason why I prefer back buttons to paddles, because there's a lot more flexibility on where you place the buttons.

If you're interested in picking up a new Battle Beaver controller, you can check out the link in the description and use code DreamStrike for 10% off.

Okay, but getting back to the practice drills.

First set of centering drills, I'm on the map Protocol, and these are my custom game settings.

I recommend that you pause right here and take a screenshot so you can set up your game just like mine.

And the gun that I'm going to be using is the C9, and this is my loadout for this gun.

Now what gun you use is completely up to you, but I just recommend using an SMG with a decently fast strafe speed.

Okay, to start off, I'm in the main courtyard of Protocol, and this first drill is called the window strafe.

And to do this drill, I'm going to start approximately 6-8 meters away from one of the closed windows, and I'm going to strafe to my left and to my right, and the goal for this drill is to try to keep my center dot within the window frame.

I strafe to the right until I get to the stairs, and then I strafe to the left until I approximately get to this crate of green missiles.

Now like I mentioned, the goal for this drill is to keep my center dot within the window frame, and I'm trying to keep my aim as smooth as possible.

In a perfect world, my aim wouldn't move at all, but because I'm a human, my aim is going to move a little bit.

So I do want that movement to be smooth, and I don't want to see a lot of jerkiness in my crosshair.

What I'm really doing here is I'm trying to apply the right amount of pressure on my right thumbstick so that my aim doesn't move even though my character is moving.

And why I like this drill a lot is that when you're in a real game, and for instance you're moving from one piece of cover to the next, oftentimes you want to keep your crosshair locked on a location where you expect an enemy to be in case they peek you while you're moving out in the open.

And what makes this difficult is that as you move your character, your crosshair moves too.

So you want to be able to develop the skill to be able to compensate for the movement of your character, and then still keep your crosshair where you want it to be.

Now if this drill is too difficult for you at first, instead of using this closed window, you can try using this door instead because it is much bigger.

Or if this drill is too easy for you, you can try moving back to about 20 meters or so, and then repeat the drill from this distance, and this should be quite a bit more difficult because the closed window target is much smaller.

Okay this next centering drill is called the moving window switch, and this centering drill is very similar to the last drill except for this time you're actually moving.

And what you do is you start at one of these doors, and you run back and forth between these two buildings, and what you want to do is you want to change the window or the door that you're centering to as you're running back and forth.

To be successful at this drill, you have to be able to accurately move your center dot back and forth between these different targets, but then once you actually move your center dot to a target, you also have to compensate for your movement because remember, as you're running, you're going to have to be making micro adjustments to your aim to keep your center dot located on that target.

Now it's up to you how many times you switch between different targets as you run back and forth between the buildings.

I would say to start off slow at first, and maybe just switch once or twice, and then as you get better at this drill, you can increase the frequency that you're changing targets.

And the reason that I like this drill is very similar to the last one, because when you play a game of Warzone, you don't always know where your opponent is going to be, and you're going to have to be able to center to different locations as you move around the map.

And this drill is a good way to simulate what it's going to be like in an actual game when you have to do this.

Practicing your thumb control is great, but there's still another big skill that you need to have great centering.

And one thing that makes crosshair placement and centering very difficult in Call of Duty is the fast movement in this game.

We have slide canceling, diving, jumping, and just in general the movement is pretty fast compared to other games.

And in many gunfights, you're going to find yourself in situations where you're flying around a corner and you need to be able to center onto a target that you can't see.

Like for instance, if I want to peek around this corner and check to see if there's a player in this window, I have to know exactly where that window is going to be on my screen as I come around the wall so that I can put my crosshair in the right location.

So part of this skill is map knowledge and knowing what the buildings look like and where the entrances are, but the other part is visualization and being able to recall this information in your head so that you can predict where you need to put your crosshair.

Now this sounds simple, but it's actually pretty difficult and this was one of the things I really struggled with early on when I was trying to learn movement and improve my aim back in MW19.

And the practice drill that I like to do for this is I like to pick a building with several windows and doors, and then I find a wall that I can slide cancel around, and I like to practice trying to place my crosshair at one of these windows or doors.

If you're a beginner, you can pick the same target each time to simplify the exercise, and if you're more advanced, you can change it up with which target you're aiming at each time.

So we've covered the first two steps to improving our passive aim, but the third step is arguably the most important, and this was one that I struggled with a lot early on.

Back in the days of Verdansk, I would watch YouTube tips and tricks on how to get better and I would feel like I was being productive, but then when I got into an actual game, I pretty much forgot everything that I'd watched in the videos and everything just fell apart.

And this was a cycle that would happen over and over and over again.

I was having a problem with something called divided attention.

When we play Call of Duty, there's so much information on our screen that it's kind of overwhelming.

You have to think about where to position yourself, what buttons to press on your controller, what's going on in the mini-map.

It's kind of a lot.

And when I got overwhelmed with this information, I would lose gunfights because my reaction time was slow because I was thinking way too much, and eventually I would get so exhausted from all this thinking that I would go into autopilot mode and I would just fall back on old habits and not get better.

Well, the trick to get out of this cycle is to simplify.

Stop trying to become a Call of Duty pro overnight.

The strategy that I try to use is I'll practice a skill in isolation using practice drills, and then I'll go into Plunder or a game and I try to use that skill against real players.

I don't worry about winning the game.

I just want to try to use that skill in gunfights, and then I'll eventually go and play real games normally, but I'll constantly remind myself during the game or in between games to focus on that skill.

Sometimes I'll do a few practice drills in between matches, but one other simple thing you can do that I should probably do more often is just write it down on a post-it note and refer back to it on your desk.

When it comes to passive aim, this isn't something that you're going to become a pro at overnight or in a week.

It's a skill you need to work on and constantly check yourself that you're doing it in a game.

And the last step to improving your passive aim is probably the hardest.

Now a lot of people think you have to play 10 hours a day to be really good at Call of Duty, but I can assure you that that is not the case.

I went from less than a 1KD to around a 5KD while I was working a full-time job and teaching myself how to edit YouTube videos.

And the big reason why I got better so quickly was I prioritized getting into as many gun fights as possible.

You see, to have good passive aim, you need to be able to predict player behavior.

And when you get into a lot of gun fights, you start to see patterns of how people play the game.

Passive aim is hard, especially in Warzone, because players can be literally anywhere.

But the more you're able to recognize patterns, you'll start to see how players camp, how they hold a building for position, how they push you when they think you're weak in a gun fight, and so many more things.

And being good at recognizing all these patterns all comes down to getting in the reps.

It's not how many hours you play, it's how many reps you get.

And the fastest way to get more reps in is to get into as many gun fights as possible.

And if you want to consistently win more gun fights, you should check out this video right here.