Why you should only compensate while aiming down sights

The settings panel has an option called Require ADS (Right Mouse). It does one thing: compensation only runs while you hold right mouse — that is, while aiming down sights.

Our advice is to leave it on permanently. There are two reasons.

Reason one: your aim stops drifting

With the option off, compensation fires every time you press left mouse — including while breaching a door, shooting a wall, or throwing a hip-fire round downrange.

The effect is that your crosshair gets pulled down in situations that are not fights at all. Then when someone does appear, your aim is in the wrong place.

Reason two: it looks normal in a replay

This is the more important one. A real player hip-firing makes no attempt to control recoil — hip fire is not about precision in the first place.

So if someone reviews your replay and notices your crosshair being pulled down with millimetre precision even while hip-firing, that is one of the clearest tells there is.

Compensating during hip fire gains you nothing and carries the most risk.

Exceptions: shotguns and secondaries

For shotguns it is usually better to disable the profile entirely. Shotgun recoil is over in one shot and compensation only pulls your aim off.

For secondaries, if you have not built a separate profile, it is better that your primary's settings do not carry over — their patterns are completely different.

Recommended baseline

• Enable Anti-Recoil: on
• Require ADS: on
• Affect NoRecoil on RapidFire: off, unless you know exactly why you want it