How to quickscope in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4

If you’ve played any Call of Duty title in the popular first-person shooter series, there’s a good chance you’ve at least tried your hand at quickscoping a few times. 

Quickscoping is a popular playstyle in Call of Duty public multiplayer that encourages players to try to snipe enemies without fully aiming down their sights. 

Related: The best sniper rifles in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4

It might sound relatively simple, but quickscoping is actually fairly difficult, even for veteran players. And this remains true in the latest installment in the Call of Duty franchise, Black Ops 4. 

Here are some basic tips and tricks on how to quickscope in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.

Choosing the best sniper for you

Since quickscoping is so much more difficult than regular sniping, it’s important to pick the right sniper for you. If you’re not comfortable with the gun you’re using, it’s going to make quickscoping even more laborious.

Each sniper in Black Ops 4 has different statistics and scope-in times, so you’ll need to figure out which gun fits your playstyle the best. We recommend trying the Paladin HB50 and Koshka snipers—if you equip the Quickdraw attachment on the Koshka, you’ll be able to aim down sights extremely quickly.

You should try out all of the snipers in Black Ops 4 in the traditional fashion before you attempt to quickscope. Once you get a good feel for the weapon of your choice and you understand how to get normal sniper kills, you can try to master the art of quickscoping.

Basic training

Almost any Call of Duty player can get a traditional sniper kill by aiming down sights and holding your breath. But quickscoping isn’t that easy

When you quickscope, you don’t fully aim down your scope. Instead, you quickly tap the left trigger (on console) to begin to aim down sights and you actually shoot before fully zooming in on your target. That’s what makes quickscoping so tough—you’re basically trying to kill the enemy without looking directly at them through your scope.

Since you’re not really looking at your opponent while using this technique, the first step to learning how to quickscope is to properly center your sniper. This will help you know where you’re shooting even though you’re not fully aiming down your sights. The best way to learn how to center your sniper, though, is to spend time using the gun—which is why it’s so important to pick a sniper that you’re comfortable with.

Another tip to help you get better at quickscoping is to visualize your scope even when you can’t see down it. Pretend that you can see your crosshairs as if you were fully zoomed-in, and shoot where your sights would be lined up. This will help you get a better feel for quickscoping, because in your mind, it might look like you’re aiming in even if you aren’t.

It’s also important to learn how long it takes to aim in with the sniper you’re using to quickscope. To do this, just mess around with your left trigger—you don’t even need to be shooting. If you hold the left trigger too long, you’ll fully aim down sights. So you need to practice the timing of how long you can hold down the left trigger in order to perform a perfect quickscope.

Quickscoping is obviously much more difficult than hardscoping, so the trick is to make it feel like you’re sniping in the traditional fashion. Once you learn the quickscoping technique, the next step is to build your muscle memory.

Practice makes perfect?

If you’ve never quickscoped before, you’re not going to master the technique in just a few hours. Practice is the key to unlocking your potential as a quickscoper. 

Timing is incredibly important when quickscoping, as you can probably imagine. If you shoot too soon, you won’t know where your bullet is going. If you shoot too late, though, you’ll probably miss your target.

It may sound a little corny, but it takes hard work and dedication to become a great quickscoper. The more you practice, the better you should get. One way to improve at quickscoping in Black Ops 4 is to start up a private match with bots. Instead of jumping right into public multiplayer, practice quickscoping the bots until you get comfortable with the timing and technique.

After you build up your confidence by destroying some bots, you can then head to public multiplayer and test your quickscoping abilities against real online players. Again, it’s not going to be easy right away—but once you get the feel for quickscoping, you’ll never want to hardscope again.

You can practice as often as you’d like, but that won’t change the fact that there’s quite a bit of luck involved in quickscoping. The best quickscopers, though, are those who practice enough to minimize the influence of luck. Once you get the muscle memory down, just keep working at it—who knows, maybe you’ll be showing off a quad-feed in the game-ending killcam faster than you can say “quickscope.”