How to find your sensitivity
The most damaging thing you can do to your aim is change your sensitivity every week. This is a process designed to end: you run it once, you get a number, and then the interesting question becomes what to do with the hours you were spending on this.
The premise: settling beats optimising
There is no published evidence that any particular sensitivity produces better aim, and there is a great deal of evidence, from every motor learning domain that has been studied, that consistent practice on a stable mapping beats the same hours spread across several mappings. That single asymmetry should determine your whole approach.
It follows that the goal of this process is not to find the best sensitivity. It is to find a defensible one quickly, so that you can stop. A value chosen in twenty minutes and used for a year will beat a value refined for a year.
Step 1: measure your constraint
Physical space is the only hard limit in this process, so start there. Measure the horizontal distance your mouse can travel before it hits something: the edge of your pad, your keyboard, a monitor stand, the desk edge. That is your usable width.
The 1.1 accounts for the mouse body itself and the fact that you will not always start from the exact left edge. If your usable width is 40 cm, anything slower than about 36 cm per 360 requires lifting during a full turn. That may be acceptable to you; it should at least be a decision.
Step 2: pick a band, not a number
Choose based on how you physically aim, which you can observe in about ten seconds by watching your own hand during a firefight.
| If this describes you | Start here | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Your forearm stays still, your wrist does everything | 24 to 32 cm | A wrist has roughly 15 cm of comfortable travel. Slower than this and you will be recruiting your arm whether you want to or not. |
| Your elbow is anchored, your forearm sweeps | 35 to 50 cm | The forearm's comfortable arc covers this range without shoulder involvement. |
| You play a game with constant 180 degree turns | Faster end of your band | Turn cost is paid every engagement; precision is paid only on long-range duels. |
| You play a game decided by single precise shots | Slower end of your band | Precision is paid every engagement; turn speed rarely is. |
| You have no idea | 35 cm | Executable on most desks, inside the band most competitive players occupy, and a fine place to be wrong from. |
Convert your chosen distance to an in-game value with the eDPI calculator in reverse mode. Set DPI to 800 unless you have a specific reason not to.
Step 3: neutralise everything that scales your input
This step is non-negotiable and takes two minutes. If any of these are wrong, your carefully chosen number is not the number you are actually playing on.
- Windows pointer speed: the sixth notch (6/11). Every other setting multiplies or drops your counts. See why 6/11.
- Enhance pointer precision: off. This is Windows mouse acceleration under a friendlier name.
- Mouse software sensitivity: 1.0, or absent. Some drivers stack a multiplier on top of DPI.
- In-game raw input: on. This bypasses the Windows pointer pipeline entirely, which is what you want.
- In-game acceleration and smoothing: off. Named differently in every engine; find it.
Step 4: the two-week test
Play normally. Do not change the value. Do not read about sensitivity. At the end, evaluate against these signatures rather than against how it feels, because how it feels is dominated by familiarity for the first fortnight.
| What you observe | Diagnosis | Adjustment |
|---|---|---|
| Consistently overshoot, then correct back | Too fast for the movement you are making | Reduce by 10%. Not more. |
| Consistently undershoot, second movement needed | Too slow for the movement you are making | Increase by 10%. |
| Running out of pad during fights | Too slow for your desk, regardless of preference | Increase, or buy space. |
| Errors in both directions with no pattern | Normal adaptation, or a tracking problem unrelated to sensitivity | Change nothing. Keep playing. |
| Wrist or forearm aches after a session | An ergonomic problem, not a sensitivity problem | See desk height and posture. |
10% is the maximum adjustment
Larger changes throw away your adaptation and restart the clock. A 10% change is small enough that most of your trained association survives and large enough to be perceptible. If you find yourself wanting a 40% change after two weeks, you almost certainly picked the wrong band in step 2 rather than the wrong number inside it.
Step 5: write it down and stop
Record the cm/360, not the in-game value. Put it somewhere you will find it in a year: a note file, a photo, the back of a drawer. When you change mouse, change game, or reinstall Windows, you restore from that number and lose nothing.
Then stop. The most common failure we see is not choosing badly, it is choosing repeatedly. Every change spends the balance you have been accumulating.
The whole process in five lines
- Measure your usable pad width, divide by 1.1: that is your slowest possible value.
- Pick a band from how you physically aim. If unsure, 35 cm per 360.
- Set pointer speed to 6/11, kill acceleration, turn raw input on, DPI 800.
- Play two weeks without touching it. Judge on over/undershoot bias, not on feel.
- Adjust by 10% at most, once. Write down the cm/360. Stop.
Related reading
- High versus low sensitivity: the actual trade, without the tribalism.
- Arm versus wrist aiming, which determines your band more than your game does.
- Mouse acceleration, and why it complicates all of the above.
- Pad size calculator to check step 1 against a standard size.
- Aim training, once the value is settled and you want to practise it.
- Converting between games, to carry the settled value into every title you play.
Frequently asked questions
How long until a new sensitivity feels normal?
Basic comfort returns within a few hours. Full recalibration of your flick distances takes one to three weeks of regular play. This gap is the trap: at day three a new sensitivity feels wrong and you conclude it is wrong, when you are simply mid-adaptation. Commit to two weeks before judging, and judge against the failure signatures below rather than against how it feels.
How do I know if my sensitivity is actually wrong rather than just unfamiliar?
There are two objective signatures. If you consistently overshoot targets and then correct back, your sensitivity is too high for the movement you are making. If you consistently undershoot and have to make a second movement in the same direction, or if you run out of mousepad during fights, it is too low. Unfamiliarity produces errors in both directions randomly; a genuine mismatch produces a consistent bias.
Should I copy a professional player's sensitivity?
As a starting point only, and converted to cm/360 rather than copied as a raw number. Their value is downstream of their desk depth, their chair height, their pad and years of adaptation, none of which you inherit. Copying the number without the context copies none of the reasons it works for them.
Is it bad to use different sensitivities in different games?
It costs you, but not catastrophically. Your motor system can hold more than one mapping, in the same way you can drive two cars with different steering. The cost appears in the first ten minutes after a switch and in the ceiling you eventually reach in each. Keeping cm/360 constant removes that cost entirely and is why we recommend it as a default.
What if my desk is too small for the sensitivity I want?
Then that sensitivity does not exist for you, and pretending otherwise produces an aim built around lifting mid-fight. Either buy the desk space, which is the cheapest fix available, or pick a value your space supports. The pad size calculator tells you which side of the line you are on.