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Sluggish mouse

WARDOGS mouse feels sluggish, like it has deceleration

Published Data as of Season 2 · 15 Oct 2026

This one is on your machine

It is V-Sync. Turn it off in the video settings and the aim comes back immediately — nothing in the mouse settings, in Windows or on the mouse itself is causing it.

What you see

Aiming feels weighted and imprecise, as though the game is adding mouse deceleration or smoothing. Sensitivity is set the same as every other shooter and turning feels like pushing something heavy.

Also reported as: mouse deceleration · mouse feels sluggish · aim feels heavy · mouse smoothing · sensitivity feels low

Fixes, in the order worth trying

Work top to bottom and stop when the game launches. Each step is labelled with how much evidence sits behind it, so you can skip the guesses if the first ones work.

  1. 01 Turn V-Sync off in the game's video settings

    Confirmed

    This is the whole fix. Three players who compared it directly describe the same thing — with V-Sync on, one said moving the crosshair felt like trying to move a tank; with it off, the sluggishness is gone and the sensitivity is what the number says. Team17 support has passed the behaviour to the team, so it is a bug rather than a preference.

  2. 02 If you need V-Sync, cap the frame rate instead

    Reported

    On a 60 Hz panel, turning V-Sync off is a real trade: tearing comes back. A frame cap a frame or two under the refresh rate, set in the driver rather than in the game, gets most of the way there without handing the mouse to whatever V-Sync is doing to it. It is a workaround, not a fix, and the fix has to come from Bulkhead.

  3. 03 Rule out the ordinary causes once, then stop

    Confirmed

    Mouse acceleration in Windows, a DPI button knocked on the mouse, and a polling rate set low all produce something similar and all are worth ten seconds. If the feel changes the moment V-Sync is toggled and nothing else, none of them is your problem.

Did this fix it for you?

Notes from other players who hit this code. Say what worked, what did not, and which region you are in — a fix that only works in one place is worth knowing about. Best-rated first, and there is no time limit: an answer from the first beta is still an answer.

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Aim that feels heavy in one game and fine in every other one is almost always a setting rather than hardware, and in WARDOGS it is a setting nobody would look at: V-Sync.

The thread that found it started in the beta, on 4 September, with a player describing what felt like mouse deceleration and being unable to find anything in the settings that explained it. It sat unanswered until launch week, when someone tried turning V-Sync off and said plainly that it fixed it, wondering aloud whether variable refresh rate was involved. Two more players confirmed the same swap on their own machines within the hour, and Team17 support replied that it had gone to the team.

What it costs you to act on depends on your monitor. On a high-refresh panel, V-Sync is not doing much for you and turning it off is free. On a 60 Hz one it is the difference between a clean image and a torn one, which is why the second step above exists — a driver-side frame cap is the nearest thing to having both while this is unfixed.

One thing to be clear about: the sensitivity slider is not the problem and raising it does not compensate. The behaviour is in how the input is being handled rather than how far it is scaled, so a higher number gives you a faster version of the same sluggishness.

This is a mouse-only fault. If your input device is a controller and it has stopped responding, or turning and aiming has become far more sensitive than the slider says, that is a different cause — see WARDOGS controller stops responding, or sensitivity spikes into aim drift.

Source

WARDOGS Steam, Report a Problem: sluggish mouse feeling ↗

If that did not do it