Recoil Control Practice: Spray Patterns and Burst Timing

Spray control comes down to one sentence: while you keep firing, draw a curve with the mouse that runs opposite to the climb. Whether you draw it right depends on whether you remember what that curve looks like.

Most people cannot hold a spray not because their hand is too slow but because that picture is not in their head. If you do not know where this magazine is going to go, all you can do is "it drifted, pull down" and chase the correction — and chasing a correction is always half a beat late, getting messier the further in you go.

What Spray Control Is Actually Fighting

When you fire continuously the crosshair does not stay put: every shot pushes your view up a little (called recoil in the spray mode on this site), and horizontally there is a drift that slowly builds, edging one way first and then swinging the other. The pattern is not a vertical line, it is a curve that climbs and bends left and right.

All you have to do is move the mouse the opposite way: continuously down vertically, and with small lateral corrections against the drift, so that your points of impact stay on the target.

Watch the impact point, not the crosshair. In most games the crosshair floats upward during a spray while your impacts stay near where you were originally aiming — those are two different places. Keeping the impacts biting along the target's center line rather than parking the crosshair on the target is the biggest difference between spray control and flicking.

The First 10 Shots and the Last 20 Are Two Different Motions

	Early phase (roughly the first 10 shots)	Late phase (after shot 10)
Vertical	Climbs fast, almost vertical; you need a quick, even pull down	Climb slows sharply and flattens out; your pull has to lighten with it
Horizontal	Very small swing, basically ignorable	Swing grows and reverses, so lateral corrections become mandatory
Common mistake	Pulling too slowly, so the first few shots float up over their head	Still pulling with the early-phase force and dragging your impacts into the ground

Beginners almost always die in the late phase: the first 10 shots look fine, then the pattern flattens out or even drifts the other way while they are still pulling with the early-phase force, and the whole pattern gets dragged below the target.

Why You Should Not Memorize Numbers

They are tightly bound to your sensitivity. The same "pull down 8 centimeters" produces a completely different view shift at a different cm/360, so someone else's numbers mean nothing to you.
They do not fit in your head. Thirty shots means thirty instructions; you cannot recall and execute them in order inside 3 seconds, and the moment you tense up it falls apart.
They have no horizontal component. Anyone who only memorized the vertical amount has zero control over the left-right swing of the last 20 shots.

The right way to remember it is as a shape: steep upward first, then a bend into the flat part, and finally a slow drift off to one side. What you store is "a figure plus a direction", and while pulling you trace that line in your head. A shape is continuous, so you always know which part of it you are drawing; numbers are discrete, and one dropped shot breaks the chain.

Train It in Segments, Then Join Them Up

Only train the first 10 shots. Turn on the impact marker in the spray mode and it will show your points of impact. There is only one goal: get the first 10 shots to cluster on one vertical line.
Fire a whole magazine, but only require the late phase not to fall apart. Deliberately use lighter force to feel what "it is climbing more slowly now" is like.
Watch two numbers. Pattern contact is the ratio of shots on target to shots fired in that magazine, and it reflects spray control better than overall accuracy; then look at first-10 accuracy. High first-10 and low overall means the problem is definitely in the last 20.
Only then add a moving target. Use the spray tracking mode to hold the vertical while walking the pattern sideways after the target. Going to this step before vertical is stable just makes both fall apart.

The most common mistake is stopping halfway through the pull. A lot of people hold the first 5 shots nicely, decide "I have it under control", and park their hand — but the crosshair does not stop just because you did. Spray control is continuous input, not a one-off action.

When to Stop Spraying

The further away the target, the bigger the share of it the same lateral drift covers: up close it is one body width off, at range it may be several bodies off.

Close range: spraying is the best answer, and the late-phase swing can even cover the opponent's movement.
Mid range: stop after roughly the first 10 shots, or ease off and then resume.
Long range: switch to short bursts of 2–4 shots, and let the pattern reset between bursts.
The tell: if you need a big flick back to find the target again after a magazine, that distance was never a spraying distance to begin with.

A Few Mechanical Traps

Your mousepad is not big enough. A full magazine takes more than ten centimeters of continuous downward travel. On a small pad, or already at the bottom edge, you hit the end and are forced to lift — and that lift breaks your firing.
Your wrist has no support. A floating wrist cannot hold a steady continuous pull; it shakes. Rest your wrist or forearm on the edge of the desk and drive with the whole forearm.
Your pull drifts into a diagonal. Under tension the hand tilts inward and the whole group of impacts slides off to one side.

Turn on the impact marker and train only the first 10 shots until they cluster on one line.

Start training spray control