The Walking Highlights Compilation Aceu by VolcanFPS

2nd October 2022

Howdy folks, VolanFPS here with another deep dive into the minds and settings of the best Apex Legends players. This time, we’re going to be talking about one of the most successful content creators for this game, a man who has insane movement and aiming skills, the one and only Brandon "aceu" Winn!

He is known around YouTube for some of the most insane clips in Apex Legends. He is the one who managed to shoot an enemy with the Tripple Take, kick them, switch to Wingman, and finishes them off, all while being in mid-air! That’s one of Aceu’s early clips that went viral! He can land his shots no matter the distance and the availability of attachments on his weapons. He was also one of the first few to discover new ways of traversal on different maps in Apex Legends. One example of that is the ability to climb up on the side of the construction building on World’s Edge. Aceu is able to use his movement tricks mid-firefight and come out on top, like that time when he jumped on the wall and then used it as a trampoline to confuse the enemy, all while shooting at them. How does he do that? Let’s try to find out.

Where Does Brandon "Aceu" Winn Come From?

Born on April 7, 1995, Brandon Winn lived most of his childhood in Terre Haute. It’s a pretty small town down in Indiana state. There was nothing much to do besides playing baseball, but Brandon didn’t like that sport very much. But after his step-father introduced young Brandon to Quake, that’s when future-aceu felt that competitive drive for the first time. It was all because he wanted to hang out with other people that played Quake, but he was so bad at the game he realized that he needed to improve. And even though he liked playing with his stepdad and friends on a PC, 7-year-old Brandon didn’t actually have his own PC. So, at some point, he started to pay more attention to console games, namely Halo and CoD. There was one Halo clip-maker that really got into young Aceu’s back then. SaLaYaHALO and his montages of Halo multiplayer were quite popular back in the day. This guy had a special style where he would get his frags using the most unconventional methods. In Halo 3, he would blow up barrels when standing next to them, giving himself a sort of a rocket jump to get behind enemy backs or use tiny, hidden spots on the map to let enemies pass him so he could kill them all one by one. This kind of style inspired Aceu to be more creative and flashy on his streams and videos.

At about the same time new esports center opened in Terre Haute called Ebash. It hosted a bunch of tournaments across a multitude of games, including Halo, CoD, and others. Brandon started to spend days at Ebash grinding for kills and taking part in tournaments that there held here. The reason he’d spend so much time there was that he didn’t have a good internet connection at home to play from his console. But at Ebash, his tournament results weren’t anything special. He was definitely not going to get into any MLG events. At that point, Brandon realized that he had hit the ceiling when it came to console games. In 2013, Brandon finally got their own PC. And to a big surprise, he started playing League of Legends! He hit Diamond rank in Season 3. It gave him confidence that he’d make a name for himself by playing LoL competitively. However, the next season he really struggled to get to the Challenger rank. So, Brandon decided Lol wasn’t made for him after all.

At that time, Aceu rediscovered the wondrous world of PC FPS gaming with the greatest online FPS game of all time - CS: GO. This game has captivated him with its precise gunplay and rewarding and tense gameplay. Brandon really got into CS: GO and started grinding wins and kills, hoping to go PRO. Back then, he was known simply as Ace, which, as he admits, was a branding nightmare that made him change his nickname to Aceu. Anyway, Brandon even found himself a team to compete at ESEA Open Qualifier in 2013. Playing for two seasons there, Aceu made a name for himself and even got into the Premier League, where he got quickly noticed by eUnited. This organization signed Brandon up, adding him to the main CS: GO roster. By that point, Aceu had been playing and grinding in competitive games for years, so this was a real breakthrough for his career as a PRO.

But with the new team and a new dream-come-true job as a PRO, the following tournaments weren’t very successful. His team would earn mediocre results, and eventually, Aceu got benched from CS: GO. As he puts it himself: “This was a wake-up call for me.” He quickly realized that a rug could be quickly pulled from under his feet, and there was nothing to fall back to. He’d still be getting invites to join other teams, but Brandon didn’t want a spot anywhere else but in the Premier League. As a result, he did something most PRO players do when they get a reality check - he started streaming. He. Obviously had to ditch his nickname because “Ace” is just a very popular word in the FPS world. For his first month, Aceu set a modest goal for himself: to reach 400 followers. Due to his laid-back and chill personality, he quickly managed to get that number. But that’s also when Apex Legends got released.

I know I must sound like a broken record by now, but Apex Legends was perfect for him. This game rewards players for raw aiming skills, just like Quake did all those years ago. It’s no wonder that Apex reminds players of arena shooters such as Quake and Halo. So, Aceu obviously hopped on that hype train in 2019 and rode it all the way! It wasn’t long before those insane clips of his would start popping up on Twitter, Reddit, Twitch, and YouTube. Word of mouth quickly made Aceu known in the community, and his talent got noticed by an NRG esports organization who were looking to create an Apex Legends roster. So, Aceu joined forces with Coby “Dizzy” Meadows and Marshall “Mohr” Mohr, and together they won a number of TwitchCon qualifiers, with Aceu becoming an MVP on one of them.

When Brandon got really noticed for his movement skills in Apex Legends, and after winning these TwitchCon tournaments, a lot of people wanted to copy his insane movement tricks. To do that, they’d go to his YoutTube channel, where he would graciously release little tutorials and guides sharing his movement tricks. That obviously greatly boosted his fanbase on YouTube. The connection that he shares with his community made him realize that he enjoys streaming even more than competing. That being said, the nature of the Battle Royale genre and the fact that a lot of things in a match, depending on RNG, made him leave Apex Legends for good in 2020. But why’d he done that if his following was peaking at that time? That’s because, at the same time, Riot Games released their take on the competitive FPS genre called Valorant. And as we already established earlier, Brandon and Valorant are arguably an even better match than him and Apex. So, now Aceu continues to impress his fans with crazy plays as he plays Valorant and Apex Legends back to back. Going back and forth between these two titles wouldn’t do him any favors as a PRO player, but Aceu is more interested in satisfying his fans by dunking on kids in these games.

Aceu’s Settings

Aceu is a PC player who uses a mouse and keyboard to control his character on the screen. He occasionally switches to a gamepad, but he does this only as some sort of challenge or for fun. Now, let’s take a look at his in-game settings.

Mouse Settings

• DPI - 800
• Polling Rate - 500 Hz
• Mouse Sensitivity - 1.8
• ADS Mouse Multiplier - 1.0
• Mouse Acceleration - Off
• Mouse Invert - Off

A lot of people are wondering what kind of sensitivity and DPI Aceu’s using. But at any given moment when Aceu is asked this question, he often can’t even remember the number. This tells me that mouse DPI and the sensitivity setting in the game aren’t too important to him. However, you’re still welcome to try out these settings. While on the topic, I’ll add what model of mouse and other peripherals Brandon is using for gaming later in the article.

Key Bindings

Since Aceu is using a keyboard, it would be education to look over what he has changed from the default settings regarding buttons and what they do.

• Sprint - L-Shift
• Jump - Space Bar
• Crouch (Toggle) - C
• Crouch (Hold) - L-Ctrl
• Tactical Ability - Q
• Ultimate Ability - Z/Y
• Interact / Pickup - E
• Inventory - Tab
• Map - M
• Toggle Fire Mode - B
• Aim Down Sight (Toggle) - Not Bound
• Aim Down Sight (Hold) - Right Click
• Melee - Mouse Wheel Button
• Reload - R
• Cycle Weapon - Mouse Wheel
• Equip Weapon 1 - 1
• Equip Weapon 2 - 2
• Holster Weapon - 3
• Equip Grenade - G
• Gibraltar Shield Toggle - H
• Use Health Item - 4
• Equip Survival Item - L-Alt

So, it would appear that his key bindings are also fairly standard. He is using the Hold option to ADS and not Toggle, which obviously just saves you one extra click of a mouse. Besides that, his ultimate is also set to Y, which is interesting. I don’t really see the reason for why he’d do it, other than it must be just his preference and nothing more.

Video Settings

• Display Mode - Full Screen
• Aspect Ratio - 16:9 (native)
• Resolution - 1920 x 1080 (native)
• Brightness - 50%
• Field of View - 110
• Color Blind Mode - Off
• Sprint View Shake - Minimal
• V-Sync - Disabled
• Adaptive Resolution FPS - 0
• Anti-Aliasing - None
• Texture Streaming Budget - None
• Texture Filtering - Bilinear
• Ambient Occlusion Quality - Disabled
• Sun Shadow Coverage - Low
• Sun Shadow Detail - Low
• Spot Shadow Detail - Disabled
• Volumetric Lightning - Disabled
• Dynamic Spot Shadows - Disabled
• Model Detail - Low
• Effects Detail - Low
• Impact Marks - Disabled
• Ragdolls - Low

It looks like Brandon gives priority to the frame rate rather than the visual fidelity of the game. So, if you want to min/max your settings for maximum performance and make sure that you have that extra couple of frames on your side during an intense fight, follow in Aceu’s footsteps and disable all bells and whistles of graphics options.

Aceu’s Gaming Setup

Two things that you need to know about Aceu’s PC. On - his face is always extremely close to the monitor. Two - in May of this year, he received a completely new rig custom built for him by Optimum Tech. Aceu had a pretty beefy PC before that, but he was still getting some lag and performance issues, so this new monster PC he just recently got kills all lag just as efficiently as Aceu humiliates his enemies in the game. So, let’s start with his PC and hardware.

• CPU - Intel i9-12900K
• GPU - RTX 3090 Ti
• Motherboard - Asus Z690 Glacial Extreme
• Power supply - Asus ROG Thor Platinum 2 1000W PSU
• Case - NZXT H510 Flow
• RAM - 2x G-Skill 32GB DDR5 6000 CL36 by TridentZ Corsair
• Water system - EK FLT80 Pump Res
• Storage - 2x 2TB Samsung 980 PRO PCI 4.0 NVMe M.2 drives

As for the rest of his setup:

• Monitor - ZOWIE XL2546
• Mouse - FinalMouse Starlight Pro
• Keyboard - Ducky One 2 TKL
• Headset - Apple EarPods
• Mousepad - ZOWIE G-SR-SE Deep Blue
• Chair - Logitech G x Herman Miller Embody
• Microphone - Shure SM7B
• Arm - Rode PSA1
• Mixer - TC-Helicon GOXLR
• Webcam - SONY A7 III

Overall, it’s a pretty impressive setup. Besides the rig itself, the mouse also deserves a spotlight.

Learn Some Insane Techniques and Start Pulling off Stunts with Legionfarm PROs!

I’ve been following Aceu for a while myself, and I do have to admit that he has a very specific playstyle that is hard to confuse with anyone else's. If you’re keen on learning some interesting moves and map secrets so you can pull off some crazy plays like Aceu, me and other PROs at Legionfarm will be happy to share and teach you some moves that you won’t learn in pubs.

We have personal training programs where our clients pick up moves that make them truly cracked. You can turn the entire game upside down with these skills and do things you thought were impossible! So, at the end of the day, Aceu will be Aceu, and you can develop your own signature moves that will make you just as creative as him!