Not all of us can aim as well as the pros, and if there’s one issue with Apex Legends, it’s that matches usually don’t last long enough for you to improve your shooting skills. However, there is a solution.
Season 16 introduced a new set of customization options to the in-game Firing Range that can help you level up your gun skills. Spending even five minutes practicing before a match can do wonders for your kill-death ratio, but how do you adjust those Firing Range settings in the first place? Here’s how you can access these settings and which ones you should consider practicing with.
How To Customize The Firing Range
Customizing the Firing range is easy to do, and there are multiple ways to navigate to the correct menu. If you hold what would usually be your map button (or TAB on PC) you’ll be brought straight to the screen where you can change the Firing Range setting. If you ever forget what button it is, just look to the top right of your screen while in the range — it’s always displayed up there.
Your Firing Range settings will save once you leave, so you won’t have to customize them every time.
Additionally, you can go to the Firing Range settings by flipping through the tabs at the top of the screen when you go into your inventory, and if you’re on PC, hitting ESC will also take you to a menu that lets you access the Firing Range settings.
Once you’re in the Firing Range setting menu, simply scroll through your options and toggle them on or off to your liking. Any player in the range can customize the top three options as those only apply to their HUD, but the rest of the options can only be changed by the Range Leader — the squad host when you entered the Firing Range.
What All The Settings Do
You’re probably wondering what exactly all of these settings do. Some of them are self-explanatory like Friendly Fire and Infinite Weapon Reloads, but others are a bit harder to understand. Here’s a quick explanation for every option you can choose from:
- Dynamic Stats: Displays some key stats from your recent practice, such as accuracy, number of headshots, and more. It’ll automatically appear at the top of your screen when you start firing and disappear if you stop shooting for a while.
- Infinite Weapon Reloads: Weapons of any type can be reloaded endlessly, even without ammo in your inventory.
- Hit Markers: Track where your latest shots landed with colored markers. Red means a hit, yellow means a headshot, and gray means a miss.
- Friendly Fire: Enables damaging your squad mates.
- Target Speed: Adjusts the speed of the moving blue targets in the range.
- Stay Still: Dummies will have a chance to stay still when they spawn.
- Strafe Left/Right: Dummies will have a chance to continuously move left and right when they spawn. Dummies can’t both stay still and strafe, so each one will choose one or the other when it spawns.
- Strafe Speed: Adjusts the speed of the aforementioned strafing Dummies. Random will make Dummies switch between the other speeds randomly.
- Shield Level: Adjusts the shields of the Dummies and can go as high as red armor.
- Can Stand: Dummies can stand whether moving or staying still.
- Can Crouch: Dummies can crouch whether moving or staying still. If Can Stand and Can Crouch are both on, Dummies will alternate between the two.
- Random Intervals: Dummies strafe or crouch at random intervals instead of in their normal pattern.
Best Firing Range Settings
If you’re taking the time to hone your aim in the Firing Range, you should try to make that time as useful as possible. It’s important to make your practice as close to a real game as possible, and having more data about your performance can help you identify your strengths and weaknesses with more precision. Here are a few settings suggestions to help you make the most of your practice time:
Hit Markers and Dynamic Stats
Using Hit Markers and Dynamic Stats is an excellent way to fine-tune your spray control and learn new weapons faster. When firing with an automatic weapon, try to keep the hit markers as close as possible to one another as you unload a clip, which will require you to compensate for the recoil.
Once you get a handle for hitting stationary Dummies or the big blue targets, back up or aim at further targets. This will make it harder to keep all the shots on the target and force you to develop more control over the gun’s recoil.
Of course, watch the hit markers and stats while you do this. If you’re seeing a bunch of stray shots, think about why those are happening and which part of the recoil is causing them to go astray, and constantly try to increase your accuracy when you’re firing at smaller targets.
Erratic Dummies
With a specific combination of settings, you can create erratically moving Dummies that closely approximate how real players strafe in fights. Training your aim this way can even help you fight Wraiths head-on. To get your Dummies to be as hard to hit as possible, adjust the following settings:
- Set Stay Still to off
- Set Strafe Left/Right to on
- Set Strafe Speed to Run
- Set Shield Level to Mythic
- Set Can Crouch to on, and leave Can Stand on as well
- Set Random Intervals to on
With all these settings in place, it’ll be significantly harder to consistently hit the Dummies, and you can use their erratic movement patterns to train your tracking skills — your ability to follow and shoot a moving target. Also, turn on Hit Markers, so you can see how much the movement patterns throw you off and adjust accordingly.
