Apex Legends Advice: Don’t Spray and Pray

by Handsome_Claptrap

In real life, “Spray n’ Pray” is a term that indicates firing full auto without making the effort to line up your gun with the target.

This strategy is very effective in the most famous FPS games such as CoD or Battlefield, where in a close range encounter you want to first start shooting, then get your crosshair or sights on target, counting on the fact that some bullets will hit it.

In other FPS, you can do this because it generally takes from 3 to 6 bullets for a kill and the mag size is around 30, so you need between 10% and 20% accuracy to kill without reloading.

If you take a look at Apex Legengs health, weapon damage and mag sizes, you’ll instantly understand why this doesn’t work. Health is 100 without armor, then 25 for each armor bar, so 150, 175 and 200 for each armor tier. For full auto weapons, damage averages around 14, meaning you’ll take between 8 and 15 shots to kill, with most mag sizes being between 15 and 20, up to 30 with mods: the accuracy required to kill without reloading is around 60% in early game, getting to more or less 45% in late game, unless we are talking about LMGs.

This means you can’t afford to spray n’ pray. You need to make sure that your sights are on target before firing, or you’ll be forced to reload.

This obviously depends on the weapon:

• Spitfire will take 8 bullets to kill a grey armor enemy with a mag of 35, so you just need 20% accuracy and can definetely hip fire up close.
• Flatline will take 10 bullets with a 20 rounds mag, you’ll need 50% accuracy. You want to ADS and land your bullets.
• R-99 takes 13 bullets with a 18 rounds mag. You’ll need 72% accuracy, with a gun with insane recoil and fire rate. If we are talking about a moving target, you will most likely need to reload: account for this beforehand and be ready to slide, hop around or get to cover, then you can spray the second mag to get the kill.
• Mozambique takes 4 accurate shots with a 3 rounds mag. You’ll need to reload. However, if you connect all shots and a nice 135 (or 120 if you miss only one pellet) pops up on the enemy, you can finish him with a 30 damage punch.

I’m planning to make a detailed spreadsheet with the required accuracy for each weapon, with different mag mods, against different armors. If you have a source that indicates how extended mags work on each gun, it would be very appreciated.

Edit: spraying =/= hip firing. Accurate hip firing means you’ll keep your target at the center of your crosshairs all the time, spray hip fire means you keep firing even when off target, for example moving left and right despite the enemy not wiggling around. This said, only a bunch of weapons have accurate enough hip fire to make it viable.

A tip to achieve accuracy is to stop firing and ADS at the same time for a split second, then as soon as you get back on target press both buttons if you are up close or wait for full ADS at mid distance.

Also, I know competitive players already do this in any game, but most players aren’t that good. If you watch the average CoD player overcompensate and readjust a lot while keeping firing.

Edit 2: Not everyone is a pro. I don’t care if this advice is old stuff for you, if you have perfect aim and split second decision making so that you can follow a moving target and stop shooting the very second you get off target. I can’t, half of this sub can’t, your next 10 random teammates probably can’t, us common mortals aren’t good enough for that, expecially on console: aim assist exists for a reason.

This is a video from Driftor, a guy that makes CoD guides since MW3. He’s not a competitive pro, but he’s good. He is using a 4-5 hits-to-kill assault rifle with a mag of 25. You can notice how he often starts firing as soon as an enemy pops out, to save time in the split second it takes to aim and ADS. Also, take a look at the rounds left in his mag after each kill: many times it will be withih 15 and 5, while he is in the 4 hits range. This means he has an accuracy between 20 and 40%, if we grossly account for few rounds fired after the kill, we get something like 30%-50%. That’s perfectly fine for CoD, but it would mean almost never getting a single mag kill in Apex.

The advice even pros can use is about the accuracy needed for single-mag kills. I’m not Wikipedia but right now i can’t think of another game where you need 10+ bullets to kill with a mag <20. Knowing the required accuracy for each gun can be helpful to determine mid-fight if you can go for the kill or you should account for a reload, always consider the opponent could be more accurate than you or have larger mags, so if you can down him, cover is top priority.