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Re: 2024 nerf aim assist?respawn

Have you seen aim assist in


@Anjunakrokus wrote:

All that Apex's aim-assist really does, is lower the rotation speed when an enemy is near your crosshair.

What does this mean:

  1. When an enemy is near your crosshair the same input means less rotation.
  2. The additional acceleration to your rotation is completely removed.
  3. The aim assist is enabled when any enemy is near your crosshair, but not necessarily in your crosshair. This means that firing your gun while the aim-assist is active does not guarantee you hitting that person.
  4. Aim assist does not directly move your camera*
    1. Stick drift, in combination with strafing means, that the aim assist will slow down your stick drift at the edge of the enemy.
    2. Expert players can use this to then aim at their enemies.

Furthermore aim-assist doesn't always work:

  • It doesn't work if the opponent is too close or too far away (from my experience, within ~3 m and outside 15-25m)
  • There are numerous bugs with the aim assist including:
    • Doesn't work if the opponent is looking at you
    • Doesn't work if you have lag
    • Doesn't work if the opponent has lag
    • Doesn't seem to work if Jupiter is in retrograde*
      • This is only partially a joke, because Respawn seems to break it about once a year for multiple months

Finally rotational aim assist has a specific deadly issue: It works by slowing down your aim. That means that if an opponent is moving close to you, they can and will outrun your aim.


We haven't even taken into account the fact that recoil removal "techniques" (read bugs that Respawn won't fix) can just straight up remove the recoil from guns (things like jitter aiming, recoil smoothing, and more).

Specifically recoil smoothing (strafing + counter aiming) aligns perfectly with how rotational aim assist works (you want to keep your crosshairs moving for it to actually do anything). This is why most controller players use it, since it helps your aim (as intended) and removes all recoil (due to the "exploit"). Which is why good players can use that to beam you.
M&K can do that too, and from a lot further away, but this is the technique that a lot of controller players use.

Professional players, like Hal, also have another relevant factor to consider: Comfort. It is not uncommon for M&K players to incur stress-related injuries to their wrists. This problem is significant to their performance, and controllers use a different set of muscles. For somebody that plays the game 40+ a week, increased comfort leads to a more stable performance.

Combine that with the fact that most pro-scene fights play out in midrange (where aim-assist shines), the fact that pros absolutely know how to abuse every advantage in their setup, and the fact that some of the M&K specific exploits are banned in ALGS (tap-strafing for example), and you get an environment which specifically nerfs M&K and a lot of people that know how to abuse controller specific advantage.


Have you actually seen videos on how the aim assist in apex works? It has been shown without a shadow of a doubt that aim assist HELP you stay on target by pulling your crosshair towards the target. When a target is in within the aim assist range, if you dont do anything with your stick. Your crosshair will still follow the target. How intense this following is, is dependet on how strong the setting for the aim assist is. E.g on console 0.6 means it helps you more stay on target and a little bit less on PC. But what aim assist ALWAYS does, is helping you to aim. So it literally pulls and follow your target. In essence it works like a aimbot, though its settings is designed in way to make it less aimbotty. The reason why people can run out of your aim assist, is because its settings is made so that aim assist will not move as fast as the player and once the player get outside of the "aim assist radius" the aim assist turns off. If aim assist was set to 1.0, then no amount of strafing would ever break aim assist. But is is not set to 1.0, it is set for 0.4. Still the basic principle of how aim assist is the same.

It is extremley obvious if you played MnK and then play controller. But there are plenty of videos on youtube that go in depth on how aim assist works.

1 Reply

  • ComicBookGuy2727's avatar
    ComicBookGuy2727
    Seasoned Ace
    2 years ago

    I would be all for going back to the ole times. Console only plays against and with console and MnK only with MnK. There was never problems then. Other than "I wanna play with my friends who play on MnK" and vice versa. 

    Then AA wouldn't affect or bother anyone. 

    But it looks like that will never happen. Trying to make is so console and MnK are equal across the board is literally impossible. Especially while trying to keep both inputs happy and satisfied. 

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