Best Aim Trainer

At Aiming.pro we believe Aiming.pro is the best aim trainer, so do Prosettings.com (here) and in a survey completed by our players, the majority thought we were the best as well!

I can understand you might think I have a biased view and you need more evidence. In this article I’ll discuss a few key features of aim trainers in general, explain why Aiming.pro smashes it and comment a little about what I believe other aim trainers are doing in those areas.

What makes a good aim trainer?

The core of any aim trainer is the aim training environment. At an absolute minimum all that is needed is something to aim at with the cursor, but to be a good aim trainer it needs a little more:

• Game matching:
  • 3D Environment
  • FOV settings
  • Sensitivity settings
• Customisable targets or bots:
  • Number shown on screen
  • Attributes such as size and shape
  • Movement behaviours
• Customisable maps:
  • Size
  • Spawn positions
  • Movement areas
• Support for various aiming skills:
  • Click Timing
  • Tracking
  • Target Switch

There are many more very desirable features - those listed above give a general flavour of what we’re talking about.

The big aim trainers generally have all these features and any features that are missing are quickly added. So it’s unlikely you’ll hop on to a popular aim trainer and find it’s missing some crucial piece of functionality. So the next question you might ask is….

What makes a really great aim trainer?

The factors that distinguish a good aim trainer from a fantastic one are where it gets interesting and it’s these same attributes that distinguish the fantastic aim trainers from each other. These are generally things that are outside and around the training environment. Which aim trainer you end up maining is likely to be dictated by how important these things are to you.

Drill Quality & Purpose

It’s one thing to have the features but it’s another to put them together into a meaningful training experience. There’s a huge difference between a drill that is purely fun and one designed to improve a particular aiming skill, and of course there’s the worst combo of a drill that’s neither helpful or fun!

Aiming.pro is super focused on skill development and there are thousands of drills supporting that goal. We also support a competitive area which hosts a set of satisfying and interesting drills with a high skill ceiling so the best players can show their prowess. We do not have a whole host of playful fun modes, as we wanted to keep the focus on serious skills development.

3daimtrainer.com appears to focus more on fun and variety. They have a ton of different modes including Zombie Survival and GoalKeeper.

Kovaaks has various sets of high quality drills hidden amongst many others. To find these you need to follow aim groups / guides usually hosted off platform such as Sparkys, Voltaic and rA.

Until recently the general word on the street was that Aimlab did not have great drills. However they have tempted Voltaic and rA over to their platform and these groups have created benchmarking drills which have proved very popular indeed.

Community

The community using a platform can be super important for a number of diverse reasons:

• Community Drill Creation - Following on from the drill quality point. Most aim trainers allow their players to create drills. If you happen to have a community of outstanding and respected aimers then they’re likely to create awesome drills. And you need awesome drills!
• New Features and Functionality - The Aiming.pro community has a loud voice when it comes to what new features will be added to the site. Having a solid community of hardcore aim trainers will mean the suggestions for new features will be the most impactful ones.
• Competition - Being the best in the world is highly motivating for pushing yourself. If you have strong competition on an aiming platform it’ll push you to improve and be the best you can be (more on competition below)
• Helpful and Friendly - Having a super Discord community that can offer advice on aim training, help on the platform and is just a place to chat and hangout is a massive bonus. The Aiming.pro Discord channel is all of those things (thanks mods & community!) - come join us!

For a slightly different take on community. We’ve recently launched Aiming.pro Communities - This is an area where any group of players can create a community on the Aiming.pro platform, customise with their own drills and view community specific leaderboards. Read more about that here.

Training progress, Drill Structure and Navigation

If an aim trainer is focused on skill development, which Aiming.pro is for sure, there needs to be carefully tailored training structures to select drills which are the correct level for your abilities and which precisely isolate the mechanics and movements you are training.

To take a couple of analogies. A gym cannot just have a single squat rack set up at 100kg. That’s going to be too light for some people and too heavy for others (e.g. me). There needs to be variable weights to allow you to build up your strengths and skills and to train at the optimum level.

Imagine you’re training for tennis and you’ve got a ball machine blasting balls all over the place. Fast forehand, smash, slow backhand, high forehand - that’s okay in particular circumstances but if you’re trying to focus on a specific technique you need the ball positioned to allow you to play the same shot repeatedly.

Aiming.pro has The Trainer which is a super nice structure allowing you to progress through 10 levels of difficulty focusing various aiming skills. Each drill has a goal and once you’ve smashed the goal you’ll unlock the next level. Use this to progress at a good pace through a diverse series of drills.

Aiming.pro also offers what we internally call “Core Skills”. It’s a great structure of the 3 main aiming skills: Click Timing, Tracking and Switching, each are broken down into sub skills, each sub-skills has a selection of drills to isolate specific techniques and behaviours, and then each of those has a set of 4-6 difficult levels with goals attached so you can get really granular on your training focus and goals.

Aimlab does a good job of skill coverage and drill organisation. There are various categories of aim/drill types which you can select from and see how you perform vs your previous attempts and vs the community.

Kovaaks drill structure and navigation is one of its weaker areas. With the launch of The Meta a while ago they tried to resolve this by creating a well defined player journey. This was universally panned as everyone just loved the sandbox mode. Most serious Kovaaks players use off-platform spreadsheets created by aiming groups which maintain a list of great drills - this is the recommended way to use Kovaaks, otherwise it’s really awkward to get to the good drills.

3daimtrainer has a decent site structure so you can always quickly get into a scenario, however I believe it’s more tailored towards fun rather than incremental skill development.

Competition

For the best aimers the competitive side of aim trainers is super important. To get this right you need to have drills which are challenging, satisfying and have a high skill ceiling. You also need integrity.

This means the drill must be played under the same conditions for all players - certainly there should be no options like weapon selection in a drill as that would alter the shooting rate, but more subtly there needs to be care about what FOV changes are allowed. It is easily possible to cheese (i.e soft-cheating) certain scenarios by using a very low FOV to get a zoomed in effect. This is a difficult balance because you also want to allow players to train with their ‘game settings’ and some games have lower FOVs than others. At Aiming.pro we have limited the competitive drills to 103H FOV to maintain their integrity and then allowed a much wider range on most other drills.

Another side of integrity is the leaderboards. Even the best AAA studios with huge amounts of resources behind them cannot stop all cheaters, so what hope do we smaller developers have? At Aiming.pro we pay attention to any top scores on our competitive drills and if any scores look suspect we’ll investigate the player and the drill data to make a judgement on whether the score is legit. We have our community to thank for flagging these to us. We have a verification system where players can submit videos for the community to view their skill level.

At the top of Kovaaks leaderboards you’ll often see a wacky score. Aiming groups and their off-platform benchmarks require video evidence of drill performance to be officially given a title of a particular skill level. This works nicely, even if it’s a bit manual.

Last time we looked at AimBeast they seemed to have pretty legit looking leaderboards and a clean competitive area.

Ease of Use and Quality of Life

We learnt early on that our players want to be able to customise EVERYTHING. I call these ‘Quality of Life’ features. We’ve made great strides in making that happen, but we haven’t got everything just yet - the latest request is to be able to customise the size of the bot health bars - niche! You can however customise all sorts of pieces of the HUD, the map colours, target colours, crosshair, sounds, the list goes on!

One thing you cannot do in Aiming.pro is customise the weapon model. 3daimtrainer has all sorts of weapon customisation options and in Aimlab you can even buy weapon skins - nice!

Ease of Use is really important for us. Our decision to make Aiming.pro browser based was to make it so easy to get online and do some aim training. We understand some players have an aversion to browser based rather than app / Steam, but believe me Aiming.pro performs well in the browser!

With super low loading times and no need to register new players can hop on Aiming.pro and get into a drill within 30 seconds. Then with a simple click or two you can register your account to keep a record of your performance and you’re away!

Recap

I’ve covered a few areas that we at Aiming.pro think are really important. Our vision when we first started the site many years ago was it’d be a serious skills development platform and that has surely influenced our thought process on which areas we think are most important to make a superb aim trainer. Every person is different and has different requirements for what they want from an aim trainer.

I’ve taken the opportunity to promote Aiming.pro here and also highlight some areas I believe the other aim trainers do well or not so well in. You’ll have to excuse me if I’m incorrect on any areas about the other aim trainers, I must admit I don’t have a huge amount of time to play them all regularly.

All of the big aim trainers have a solid set of core features, so whichever one you choose you’ll be able to improve your aim.

Here are my top tips:

• Aiming.pro - if you’re highly skilled already head straight to the competitive area and play the Global Aim Rank and the Season 3 drills. If you’re beginner or intermediate head to The Trainer and play though a nicely laid out skill progression
• Kovaaks - definitely find the rA or Voltaic kovaaks benchmarks (via google) and follow their drills.
• AimLab - recommend you find the rA or Voltaic aimlab benchmarks (via their search functionality).
• 3daimtrainer.com - enjoy yourself on their variety of fun modes

What features do you most value in an aim trainer? Let us know on social / discord: