Hi

I've been hooked on this game since last year, I went from failing Normal maps to S-ranking various insane songs. Over the past year I've noticed steady improvement, maybe I'd go back to a song I couldn't complete before and suddenly I'd be finding it easy. But recently I seem to have just stopped improving.

I have 17000 plays (most likely from spamming the retry button like mad). I find that my biggest problem so far is that while my brain can follow most of the notes in insane songs, my hand decides it's had enough and refuses to click accurately. I'd get maybe 600/800 combos every time on a song and then either forget to press Z/X or miss by a millimetre, or have my heart rate jump up like crazy and miss beats randomly. Or during those really nasty slow streams which zigzag all over the screen...

Is anyone else stuck in terms of skill level? It feels like I'm just throwing myself repeatedly at a song until I S-rank it, and then I play the song again and I end up failing the song the next day..

Stop caring about FC/combo, play stuff on the peak of your reading level even if their execution is completely impossible for you, try your best on them. Spend enough time on this and once you go back to the regular stuff you played you'll once again get this effect of "hey wtf, this map used to be hard, why does it feel like an [Easy] now".

There is no skill plateau, you just need to find harder stuff to challenge yourself on to push forward at a faster rate. You were improving fast/steady earlier because you could always find harder maps in the rankings to challenge yourself on, but if you can already do well on ranked Insanes then to keep improving steadily you'll have to look for (more-)challenging unapproved maps. So take a shovel and go grave digging~

I'm guessing I should be searching the approved/pending maps? I've been playing ranked mostly.

I think I'm able to follow most songs at this point, but like you said, execution is horrifyingly impossible for me, so I'd repeatedly fail in the first 10 seconds of the song even though I know exactly what to click...

If you feel as if you can't get better, play harder maps. Halftime/nofail if you have to, just grind on harder maps and you WILL learn how to play them.

I've felt that I can't get better ever since whenever. It happens often \o\

i always feel like im stuck on a skill plateau, but then i play a map i couldnt fc earlier and i fc it without too much trouble so i realize i actually am still getting better.

play maps that you can barely pass for a couple hours a day trying your hardest and concentrating = win

Once upon a time, I played a map 200 times and I fail always. 2 weeks later, I almost FCed it.

There simply is no way around having such a learning curve:

You can always try different playstyles though and see if your plateau is going to be higher.
I profited a lot from:
Mouse + accel -> Tablet with small area and tapping -> Tablet with full area and keyboard only (except for certain parts)

Please note that "playstyles" also is about how you try to read maps or try to move your hand. It might help if you try focusing on each hitcircle seperately, dim the background, get minimalist skins and try to move in straight lines.

Reducing the DPI of my mouse helped a lot. See if you can improve your setup and posture, as well as how you hold your mouse, in a way which gives you more control. It helps.

<-- playing with 1750dpi
changing dpi is personal preference

Playing with 3600 dpi atm, feels like I lower my DPI my hands can't move fast enough

Increase it? I suggested reducing it because high DPI causes a lot of jitter and overshoot. If you want to improve, then all you can do is either continue as you are or try to change your style considerably. I thought that low DPI would be too slow for me as well, but it ended up making me much better. 500 is worth trying to adapt to.

I maintain that there is an effective upper limit to DPI, but there is no lower limit. Resolution impacts how high the upper limit presents.

I don't think that's really true. Cursor travel scales to the resolution of the window and the resolution of the monitor doesn't affect anything.

Honestly, I would spend a bit of time to play with different setups, from posture, mouse grip, sensitivity, screen position and all that stuff. Also, make sure that Windows' mouse sensitivity is set to default, "Increase mouse sensitivity" is off, osu!'s mouse settings are set to default and acceleration is disabled on your mouse in all forms.

I am talking about the resolution of the Osu! window, not the monitor. If what you mean is that the cursor moves more quickly on a smaller Osu! resolution, then you are wrong. I've tested this, and the increase or decrease in distance causes the cursor to act like it is moving more quickly or more slowly--not to mention that the size of the cursor gets larger or slower, which makes it appear to behave differently--but, in fact, the cursor still moves at the same uniform rate that it would move over your desktop with. This is, of course, assuming that your Osu! cursor settings are at 1.0, which they rightly should be. The longer distance on a higher resolution will make a higher DPI feel more comfortable, though, because you're not required to make as small a movement, and the hit circles allow more space for you to hit.

I agree that mouse grip and posture are super important for beginning players when moving up to a more intermediate level. I had to spend a lot of time considering it and researching.

Everyone reaches that point sometime in lif-...I mean osu!. Instead of worrying on how you're having problems passing your map which you could've passed several millenniums ago, just keep moving on and do your business. Or take a short break (one, two weeks).

Actually, at this point I'd like to point out something which I believe everyone has experienced least once in their osu! lifetime. It's this "form factor" which is the highest when a player say, plays the map for the first time, or suddenly stumbles on a revelation and starts playing like a Cookiezi or WhiteWolf. For this rise in form I'll call it the honeymoon period (yes, I know it's that marriage term, but heck, it works). This period is the most prominent when one starts passing Insanes for fun on a regular basis, and usually lasts the longest. How long it lasts though, depends on the player himself, but this is the time when it's best to keep playing and make sure that this form factor gets converted into class.

You, hylianloach, probably just ended your honeymoon period and now you're suffering from the drawbacks of reduced form and whatnot. That at least, if you've been playing Insanes since forever and haven't been going back to the Normals and easier difficulties for goodness knows what reason related to rank whoring and stuff. Having been through that honeymoon period, your sub-conciousness will remember how it feels to pass Insanes regularly, but obviously your body won't, so it's up to you to make sure your body remembers what your sub-conciousness does. To do that, please play more Insanes, and fuck the Hards and the Normals and the Easys. And I'm not talking about repeating plays until you pass/FC the map, but playing several different Insanes until you get the feel back.

(I just feel I've bullshitted my way through, but I'm keeping this here)

Also, by looking at your plays and high scores, I'll say that you're actually very far from reaching your limit. Once you start passing Jehovah's Yahveh (Lunatic) and then Emotional Skyscraper (Extra, approved), then you can safely say that you're about near the limit for a regular osu! player.

Made it halfway through Jehovah's on my third play, hopefully I'll pass this in a few more tries.. The hardest I've played so far was either masterpiece (http://osu.ppy.sh/b/47152&m=0) and some hyadain song. The former I can't pass the jumps halfway through the song and the latter has ridiculous health drain :/

Do I just browse around the approved beatmaps for harder songs?

Stick to what you have now, if you have a lot, and stop just passing them. Start FCing them.