Best Mouse for COD Warzone + Settings

The latest Call of Duty is doing away with a lot of series traditions. Everything from the battle royale format to the free to play nature suggest a bold evolution for the series, but what hasn’t changed are the keys to success: skill with a virtual gun and the right tools to get the job done. We’re here to help you hone both.

There are plenty of guides out there to help you perfect your in game strategy, but we’re here to provide you with something a little less obvious but just as crucial: a guide to the hardware. We’ll start by helping you pick out the best controller for Call of Duty: Warzone and then present you with the best options for in-game settings so you can excel in battle.

Mice for COD Warzone + Settings

We’ve already provided some exhaustive guides to the specs and features you should look for when shopping for a gaming mouse. Instead, we’re going to focus our attention here on how you can take your new mouse and fine tune it to suit your style of play in Call of Duty’s new battle royale.

There are a couple of caveats here. First, Warzone is still in its early days, so there’s less data to analyze than in many other games. Second, everyone’s style of play is going to necessitate somewhat different settings. While we build our analysis off what the pros are doing, you should just consider that a starting point rather than a definitive statement.

Mouse Sensitivity

In a lot of more traditional first person shooters, we’d recommend adjusting to a sensitivity level that suits your play style: lower sensitivity for finesse and sniping and higher sensitivity for mobility focused players, but the randomized nature of much of Warzone means you can’t always lean into the roles you prefer, and you might have to adjust your strategy on the fly.

That’s why we generally suggest finding a mouse sensitivity level that sits a little more middle of the road if you lean towards dramatic DPI levels. Since both the DPI of your mouse and the sensitivity settings in-game impact the responsiveness of your mouse, pros tend to use an adjusted number known as eDPI. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to calculate. Just multiple your mouse’s DPI level by the sensitivity in-game. Most pros are operating at an eDPI in the 3000s.

ADS Mouse Sensitivity

The Call of Duty series has used what they call Legacy Mode for the past few games, and it’s lended a certain degree of uniqueness to the flow of combat. But the difference between legacy and relative mode is generally one of technicalities: different formulas used to determine distance and speed.

In basic terms, relative mode replicates the same mouse sensitivity your guns would normally possess while looking down the scops, and legacy mode adjusts it depending on the zoom. Relative mode offers greater assistance but requires more precision to get perfect shots, while legacy mode is generally reserved for experts. The latter will feel natural to Call of Duty vets, but gamers new to the series or to first person shooters in general should stick with relative.

Mouse Inversion

This is a factor that’s completely up to your personal preference. Most gamers tend to prefer not using mouse inversion, but if all of your experience (or your best experience) comes from using an inverted mouse or controller, you should just pick what’s going to be most comfortable for you.

Mouse Acceleration

Mouse acceleration is good for a lot of things: office work, surfing the web, checking your email. What it’s not good for is gaming. That’s because mouse acceleration automatically compensates for the speed of your hand movements in how fast the mouse is moved physically In other words, it doesn’t offer one to one translation of movement.

That means imprecise movement with every quick action you make – and since quick responses generally require some level of accuracy, leaving mouse acceleration on will get you killed. If you’re used to it, it’s better to quit the habit soon rather than find your skills hobbled in the future.

Mouse Filtering

Mouse filtering is another one of those settings options that sounds great on paper and works very well in certain limited case uses (namely the same ones as mouse acceleration), but it can be just as problematic for gaming. With mouse filtering, your mouse will read the movement over the last two frames and find an average to make the results as smooth as possible.

That’s great when you’re trying to navigate Chrome or Google Docs but it’s much less valuable when you’re in the heat of battle. Leaving mouse filtering on leaves you with the very real possibility of missing a headshot because of overcorrection on the part of your central processor.

Mouse Smoothing

Finally, we have mouse smoothing. It’s another setting that can be great for everyday work but can get you killed in the Warzone. Mouse smoothing uses predictive reasoning rather than an average of your movements to provide a smoother line of sight. It’s more sophisticated than mouse filtering, but that also means it’s more unpredictable. Just ax it, as it will serve as assisted aim at best and a straight up  liability at worst.

Final Thoughts

So what did we learn about the right settings for Call of Duty: Warzone? It’s fundamentally still the same Call of Duty, but the new battle royale format requires a looser and more improvisational sense of play. That means that you can’t just adjust your settings to match a particular class and hope to succeed.

But the fortunate part is you don’t have to do a lot to fix your settings. Just like in almost every game, you’ll just need to adjust the sensitivity to match your specific play style, and you can use the data above to help you determine what the right sensitivity is for the flow of Warzone.

But if you want to draw even more information from how the pros perform, there are some tools at your disposal.

Our particular favorite is ProSettings.net. It provides full settings and configurations from some of the biggest players in the game, and if you recognize their styles, they can provide you with a great benchmark to apply against yourself. Just keep in mind that the perfect settings and the perfect mouse are ultimately going to be personal. You can use the information above and in ProSettings.net as a starting point, but you’ll eventually want to tweak it to find out what works.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to provide a shopping guide for Call of Duty: Warzone mice on our list, but we have plenty of information you can dig through if you want to make yourself an expert. From guides to gaming mice that cover all the specs to informational articles that provide more in depth information on technical details like how mouse sensitivity works.