Why you undershoot flicks in Valorant (and when it is fine)
Undershooting is the mirror problem: your first swing stops short of the target, and you drag the last few degrees in one or more catch-up corrections. Here is the part most Valorant sensitivity threads get wrong — a small undershoot is not a flaw. It is how healthy aim works.
Small undershoot is normal (and even optimal)
Decades of motor-control research on rapid aimed movements show that people deliberately program their first movement to land slightly short. The reason is asymmetry: if you land short, the correction continues in the same direction your hand is already travelling; if you fly past, you must brake, reverse and re-accelerate, which costs far more time. Your nervous system knows this and biases under on purpose.
So a mean bias of a few percent under is not a problem to fix — it is the signature of a well-calibrated sensitivity. What you are looking for is a large, systematic shortfall.
When undershooting is a real problem
- Your flicks routinely stop 10–15%+ short, and kills need two or three visible corrections rather than one.
- Wide swings feel physically exhausting — you run out of mousepad or arm room before you run out of angle, typical after copying a very low pro value such as 0.2 at 800 DPI (82 cm/360) without the desk to match.
- Your time-to-kill on off-angle fights is noticeably worse than on pre-aimed ones, because every extra correction adds 150–250 ms — an eternity against a Vandal.
In an AimFinder replay report this reads as a negative overshoot percentage per kill (say −12%); the in-browser test shows it as the staircase repeatedly nudging your sensitivity up.
Common causes
- eDPI too low for your setup. The practised swing you actually have room for turns fewer degrees than fights demand. Check where you stand with the Valorant sensitivity ranges — below 200 eDPI needs deliberate arm technique and a big pad.
- Not enough mousepad or arm room. If your cm/360 is larger than the usable width of your pad, your hand learns to stop early because it has to. Compute it with the cm/360 calculator.
- Tension and hesitation. A cramped grip brakes the swing early — often visible as undershoot that appears late in long sessions or in decisive rounds.
- Low-sens micro-aim habits on long flicks. Players trained on tiny crosshair-placement adjustments sometimes never commit to one full ballistic movement, replacing it with a chain of small pulls. That is a technique issue no sensitivity change fixes.
How to fix it
1. Confirm it is systematic. Run the sensitivity test or upload a replay — a handful of short flicks in one clutch round proves nothing; dozens of measured kills do. AimFinder’s per-kill reconstruction is exactly this measurement (see what replay analysis can measure).
2. Raise eDPI gently. Steps of about 5–10% are enough — from 0.30 to 0.32 at 800 DPI, not to 0.45; your existing muscle memory carries over and re-settles within a few days. Re-measure after each step instead of stacking changes.
3. Train commitment, not just precision. The Wide Flicks and Moving Targets drills, with realistic Valorant movement switched on, reward a single decisive swing plus one small correction — the exact pattern you want against a jiggling duelist. Track your scores over a week; the history page shows whether the change actually helped.
Undershoot vs overshoot: the quick self-diagnosis
Corrections mostly continuing in the flick’s direction → you undershoot → sensitivity may be too low. Corrections mostly reversing → you overshoot → read the companion guide, why you overshoot flicks in Valorant. Roughly balanced and small either way → leave your sensitivity alone and spend the time on crosshair placement and on stopping before you shoot.