"Don't think you're capable. Know that you are."
Definition and Fundamental Forms of Strafe Aiming
This section defines strafe aiming before explaining its most fundamental forms. To make the discussion simpler, assume the target you're aiming at is at mid-range and can only move left or right.
The first thing to note is that strafe aiming doesn’t restrict your mouse movement, but rather your movement skills: you’re only allowed and required to change direction whenever the target you’re aiming at does. Strafe aiming is, therefore, a reactive aiming style, as you’re not taking any initiative to change direction on your own to make the enemy miss. In other words, you are initially (and only initially) trying to maximize your damage output regardless of everything else.
Now, as explained in the previous section, even with perfect reading skills and flawless mouse control, you can’t instantly react to a direction change. This means it’s impossible to strafe aim at a target that’s changing direction very quickly (often referred to as short dodge or AD spam). It’s worth noting that with good reading skills, recognizing that your enemy is dodging is relatively quick (about 200 to 300 ms), and it’s always possible to aim well in the middle of direction changes to land several free hits without having to lock onto the target. This also shows that dodging for too long is a poor movement strategy.
Since no one has perfect reading skills, adding a short dodge to fake or confuse your enemy is a very good strategy to make them miss (though this is not actually strafe aiming!).
Remember that there are eight possible movement directions. With each change in your enemy’s direction, when aiming, you’re forced to choose between seven directions, since you’re already moving in one. Since there are 8 directions you can choose from for the previous direction, there are 56 possible ways to strafe aim for each direction change of your enemy. That’s quite a lot, and if we were being rigorous, we’d actually need to distinguish the forms of strafe aiming depending on the enemy’s direction change as well.
Fortunately for us, assuming perfect reading skills (a very strong assumption), only the apparent movement of the enemy on your screen matters. For example, an enemy changing direction from forward+left to forward+right while you respond by changing from right to left is equivalent to an enemy changing from right to left while you respond by going from forward+left to forward+right, at least in terms of mouse control skills.
(I kept the original explanations from the official technique author, “vFAIMER7,” as they form the foundation of my new study specifically focused on Fortnite – Zero Build combat. These techniques are fundamental to the development of my guide and represent an approach I want to pass on.)