You probably already know that it’s possible to achieve an ace in a single shot. Back in
2014, I showed a one-shot AWP ace. This was an easy, 12 second video that took me about
10 minutes to make, and which is now sitting at over a million views. Simpler times.
But while it’s POSSIBLE, I’m sure you understand why the chances of it happening
in a proper match are highly unlikely. As well as how improbable it is that all 5 enemies
will allow themselves to perfectly line themselves up for you, you’ve also got to be close
enough that damage drop-off doesn’t ruin it. And, as you can see from the first shot
I attempted in my 2014 video, even if everything’s perfect, the game might still decide that
you didn’t hit anyone, CS:GO’ing you in the worst possible way.
So we might never see a one-hit ace outside of heavily scripted frag videos.
I tell a lie. It happened back in 2018, in this clip. And of course it’s on Banana.
Dark_Moon is the legend who pulled this off. While fully flashed, no less. Against players
ranging from gold 4 through to supreme in skill. It’s just as a shame the game back
then didn’t have all of the killfeed icons that we have today, cos I imagine it would
look amazing. This is, to my knowledge, THE only time it’s
ever happened in a proper game. It was such a crazy event that even the victims of the
clip congratulated Dark Moon on his little stunt.
Though it wasn’t enough to impress everybody. Pm_me_your_assholes over on reddit said it
doesn’t deserve the term ‘ace’ because it was just a lucky shot, no skill required.
So until a skilful single-shot ace is achieved, I guess he’ll just have to remain disappointed.
But now a one-shot ace has been done, the logical thing to ask is… how else can you
pull off an ace in just a single shot? It could be done with a frag grenade, provided
everybody starts on low enough health. This has also been done before. In fact, it’s
probably one of the easiest ways to perform a one-shot ace.
And in the unlikely event that the whole enemy team is stood on each others’ heads, all
while being on just 1 HP, you can kill them with a single decoy grenade like so.
A decoy’s blast can kill people too. Up until this year you could use this to kill
your teammates, but people were abusing it too much so it’s been disabled, meaning
you’ll only stand a chance of killing the ENEMY team in an ace this way now.
You can also kill all 5 enemies with the bomb. Which I guess, technically, would be a single
click. There’s even an achievement for it, which APPARENTLY 2.4% of the game’s playerbase
has earned… though I suspect most people pulled it off on a custom map against bots,
since in all my time playing the game I’ve never, EVER managed to kill all of the enemies
with the bomb blast. In fact I only unlocked it this August, and that was on a custom map.
And yes you can Molotov a whole team to death as well. You can see Cloud9 trying it here.
But I also investigated which weapons could manage it. The AWP is the only one that can
kill 5 enemies on full health. It can do this even when they’re wearing armour. But this
is just with the AWP. Even the other snipers will be unable to kill 5 players on full health,
stopping at only 4 instead. So I lowered their health down to 1 HP.
With 5 enemies lined up, all on 1 HP, you’d imagine that any weapon in the game would
be able to go through all of them. But that isn’t the case; some, like the SMGs or most
pistols, will only kill a maximum of 2 people in a single shot before the bullet is stopped.
The P250, Aug, Famas, Galil, SG553 and M249 all kill a maximum of 3.
The AK, Negev and M4’s (Both when suppressed and un-suppressed), can kill up to 4.
And finally, these are the weapons that can one-hit ace against 5 enemies on 1 health.
The deagle and revolver do an excellent job, as do the snipers, as you’d expect. What
you might be surprised to see here are the shotguns, which you’d think would be stopped
sooner. What happens here is each pellet is calculated separately, so the first pellet
kills the first enemy, then the rest pass through to the next, depleting by just 1 pellet
each time. So because of this, all shotguns can ace, provided the enemies are weak enough
to be killed by a single pellet or so. Although sort of cheating, the Famas in burst
mode can also tear through all 5 enemies. And the glock’s burst mode could as well.
But I found it to be a bit inconsistent in practice and a lot of the time only managed
4 kills before it seemingly ran out of steam. This could perhaps be due to the recoil, or
just cos it’s CS:GO. But if you’re wanting to ace against 5 1 hp enemies with a glock
burst fire mode, just remember to aim down to account for where the third bullet will
go, after the large amount of recoil it’s subjected to.
And just to show off I tried killing all 5 enemies with a sawed off at the same time.
But not when all perfectly lined up! The shotguns received an update a few years ago. Every
time you fire them, the pellets will all end up in roughly the same pattern every time.
This was done to try and make them less ‘random’ and more skill-based. But it didn’t really
work. But by working out where all of the pellets from the sawed-off go, and by conveniently
placing an enemy over each one, I can manage THIS.
THIS HERE, is the holy grail of bullet aces in CS:GO. 5 enemies killed by 5 separate pellets
landing in different spots. But as highly unlikely as it might be that we’ll see this
within our lifetimes, give a million monkeys a million type-writers and eventually they’ll
pull it off. With CS:GO we’re already a few years in.