Valorant rewards the same thing round after round: put your crosshair on a head and click. That places a premium on precision over speed, which is why the settings that dominate the top of the ladder look slow to newcomers. If your aim feels twitchy or your sprays wander, your sensitivity is one of the first things worth examining — and the good news is there's a well-worn range to aim for.
Valorant's gunplay is built around tight, deliberate movements. Recoil control means pulling your aim down in small, controlled amounts; peeking a corner means micro-adjusting onto a head-height line; and one tap can end a duel. All of that is easier when a small hand movement covers a small on-screen distance, because you have more physical room to be precise.
A high sensitivity does the opposite: a tiny flick of the wrist swings the crosshair a long way, so the margin for error shrinks and overshooting becomes routine. Lower sensitivity spreads each degree of turn across more centimetres of mousepad, giving your hand the fine control the game demands. It's the reason most serious players run settings that feel almost sluggish at first — the trade of raw speed for repeatable accuracy is worth it in a game decided by headshots.
There's no single correct number, but the professional scene clusters tightly. Most pros sit around 800 DPI with an in-game sensitivity roughly between 0.3 and 0.5. That combination produces something in the region of 30 to 45 cm per 360 — the distance you'd drag the mouse to spin a full circle in game.
Reality check: these are tendencies, not rules. Plenty of excellent players sit outside this range because it suits their arm space and grip. Treat the pro cluster as a sensible starting zone, not a target you must hit exactly.
The DPI number and the in-game number are meaningless on their own — what matters is what they produce together. That combined figure is cm/360: the number of centimetres you physically move the mouse to complete one full 360-degree turn. It's the honest measure of sensitivity because it folds both settings into one comparable value.
Here's the part that trips people up. Every game applies its own conversion between your in-game number and actual degrees turned, and Valorant's is a yaw of 0.07. That means an in-game sensitivity of 1.0 in Valorant turns you a specific amount that won't match "1.0" in another title. So copying a friend's raw in-game number across games is a mistake — you have to compare by cm/360 instead. You can confirm your own DPI is what you think it is with our DPI Analyser, then work everything out from a known figure.
If you already aim well in another shooter, don't start from scratch — carry your muscle memory over. The reliable way is to keep your DPI the same and convert by cm/360:
This is far better than eyeballing a number, precisely because of that 0.07 yaw — the same digits feel different between games. Our deeper walkthrough on how to convert sensitivity between games covers the maths if you want to understand what the converter is doing.
No prior game to convert from? Build it up methodically instead of guessing:
Make sure mouse acceleration and Windows pointer scaling are off before you tune anything — otherwise your effective sensitivity changes with how fast you move, and no fixed number will feel stable.
A few habits quietly sabotage aim in Valorant:
If you're still weighing up the DPI side of the equation more broadly, our guide to the best DPI for FPS games puts Valorant's preferences in the wider competitive context.