Introduction
I'm aware there's already a pretty good Guide On the EZ Mod by the user Almost, but I'd like to give it a go myself, share my own tips on learning the mod, and the EZ Training pack I made. For the past one and half years, whenever I've played osu! standard, it's pretty much always been with the EZ mod enabled, so, I definitely think I have good knowledge of the EZ mod, which I'd like to share with everyone in hopes of helping someone out on their way to EZ mastery

This guide will be split up into these main sections:

1. Introduction - What you're reading right now
2. Getting Started - Some things to do while starting EZ.
3. Practicing - What/how you should practice the mod.
4. General Tips - Anything else I haven't talked about yet.
5. Beatmap Packs - The EZ training pack and gimmick/reading packs I made.
6. Other Resources - Some other useful things to aid you in learning EZ.

Anyways, here's an introduction to the mod itself:
The Easy Mod (abbreviated as "EZ") is a difficulty reducing mod that has a 0.5 times score multiplier, and halves every difficulty setting of a beatmap. You'd think with properties like that, EZ would make the game significantly easier right?. In reality, unless you're playing very low star maps, EZ makes the game significantly harder in most cases, at least if you're not used to the mod. Halving the Approach Rate (AR) and Circle Size (CS) of a map alone is enough to make the map super cluttered and sometimes near impossible to read. On top of that, halving the Overall Difficulty (OD) leads to an increased chance of you running into the dreaded note-lock It has some advantages mechanically too though, the Health Points (HP) are also halved of course, and you get two extra lives (for a total of three). This can be very beneficial for hard map passes, or even just for practicing.

Players have ended up primarily using the EZ mod as a "difficulty increasing mod" because of the "negative" effects listed above. EZ mod certainly isn't for everyone though, it most likely won't help you improve overall, and certainly won't help you rank up either, as using the EZ mod rewards significantly less PP than other mods, or even NoMod. Well, why do people use it then? It is definitely a "for fun" mod, and adds a completely new challenge to the game. Because of the low AR (a maximum of AR5 while using EZ, or a maximum of AR7.67 with EZDTTHX Almost), there's lots of room for you to improve your reading while using this mod too, which is obviously a very important skill. I've personally come to enjoy osu! a lot more than I used to because of this mod, despite the few downsides to it. You'll have to try it out for yourself to see if it's right for you or not! For more information on the EZ mod, check out this Wiki Article.

Getting Started
All you have to do is select the mod and start playing right? How hard could it be? Well, you might run into a few difficulties if you don't make a few preparations first!

Settings:
Unsurprisingly, there's not much you have to change in osu!'s settings to play with the EZ mod optimally, however, there are a couple of small things worth mentioning. Generally, you want all options under the "Detail Settings" section disabled, this is because they (mostly) cause unnecessary or distracting animations/effects to appear on screen. This is not something we want happening when there is already a lot of visual clutter on the screen. Another option you may want to change is the "Ignore All Beatmap Skins" option under the "Skin" section. For the most part, you will want to have this enabled, but you can always change this on a map-by-map basis by enabling/disabling the "Ignore Beatmap Skin" option in the pre-map settings. The reason you generally don't want to use beatmap skins is because A) beatmap combo colours are normally not suitable for using the EZ mod, and B) custom beatmap skins are usually pretty distracting. In theory, these are both preference things though, so just keep them in mind at the very least.

Skins:
Because of how cluttered and "messy" things get while using the EZ mod (because of the low AR and CS values) you'll need to choose what skin you use wisely. Skins with lots of detail and lots of cool flashy images will likely not be the best choice for you in this case. Ideally, you'll want to use a bright and very clean/minimalistic skin to avoid making an unreadable mess on your screen. I personally use a slightly edited version of the -GN 2018 skin, or sometimes an Edited Default Skin. This is because both of these skins are very minimalistic and have clearly contrasting combo colours, with no unnecessary elements to be distracted by. If nothing else, it's important to have bright and clearly different combo colours, as well as bold/clear follow points in your skin. This is to ensure the readability of your skin is as clear as possible. Contrasting combo colours allows you to easily differentiate between two (or more) combos, if all your combo colours are similar, you might not be able to tell which circle comes next! To help make it clearer, you want your combo colours to be fairly bright too, dull combo colours aren't going to do you any good. It's also important to have clear follow points to further help you determine which circles/combos come next. Speaking of circles, it is quite important to have non-opaque hitcircles in your skin. This is to allow easier reading of stacked notes. You don't have to have invisible hitcircles like the Rafis skin, for example, but semi-transparent hitcircles will be very beneficial.

Beatmaps:
When you first start playing EZ, it's probably not the best idea to start playing crazy tech maps or anything straight away. I mean, you're welcome to try, but unless your reading is already insanely good, you probably won't get far. Not to worry though! You will, of course, get there eventually ...with some practice of course Just like playing the game normally, it's important to start with the basics. At first, you'll probably want to play fairly slow and easy maps, anything in your comfortable playing star range will work (most likely will have to start out at around 3 to 4 stars though). "Farm" maps are usually quite good in this case, as they have very simple rhythm choices throughout, making reading not too difficult. Once you start getting used to EZ and getting better at it, you can pretty much play whatever you feel like, if something feels too hard for you though, come back to it another time after you've improved some more. For more information on what maps you should be playing at each stage of playing EZ, check out my EZ Training Map Pack down below in the "Beatmap Packs" section of this post, as well as the "Practicing" section below.

Practicing
When practicing anything in osu!, you want to practice the "right" way, because the last thing you want to do is develop bad habits that are a detriment to your playing ability. Here are some things to keep in mind while practicing EZ, so that you don't wind up making negative progress.

Play Time:
When learning new skills (in general), it is important to allocate an appropriate amount of time to practicing that new skill, the same thing can be applied to learning EZ. If you barely play with EZ enabled (at first anyways) you most likely won't make much progress (or at least very slow progress). Not to say that you need to play with EZ enabled all the time, but you need to dedicate a good amount of time to it if you want to learn it properly. For example, I personally don't think playing every fifth map with EZ, or playing it on one day of each week, is quite enough to make any good progress with the mod. It's up to you of course, but you need enough time in each session to get used to the AR and to start actually improving with it, as well as doing this for a few consecutive days as to not instantly forget what you've learned. I'm personally not sure what sort of amounts of time would be ideal, because I took the "Leave EZ on 24/7" approach, sorry

Consistency:
This doesn't only apply to EZ by any means, but becoming fairly "consistent" is a very good thing to aim for when it comes to EZ. This means always being able to play at a high level(or technically and level), without having to play a map a million times to get a good score on it. In order to become a consistent EZ mod player, avoid retry spamming, quitting maps early, and/or only playing a tiny pool of maps over and over. Doing these things is probably the easiest way to end up with bad, hard-to-reverse habits. It's important to play a map through, even if you aren't doing so well, and to play a wide variety of maps when possible.

(Not) Memorising:
While I personally believe it's okay to memorise maps with EZ when you are just starting out, it's not beneficial to you overall to memorise maps. The only reason it's okay to do this at the very beginning is so that you can get used to the AR etc and get a feel for the mod overall. Beyond that though, unless you know exactly what you're doing (for example, you're used to memorising maps from using FL), it will cause you to develop muscle memory and such for specific maps, which is not something you want to be doing (at least if you play the map hundreds of times to/while you memorise it). This can lead to bad habits overall while playing, and will lead you to not improving as much, or having a harder time improving.

Beatmaps (again):
While playing with EZ, make sure you're playing maps that are the right difficulty for you. If you are playing maps that are way too hard for you, you won't be making much progress overall. The same goes for if you are playing maps that are way too easy, you need to find a good balance of difficulty in the maps you're playing. By slowly starting to push the difficulty/complexity of maps up, you will slowly start to be able to play harder and harder maps, thus improving at EZ. For more information on what maps you should be playing at each stage of playing EZ, check out my EZ Training Map Pack down below in the "Beatmap Packs" section of this post, as well as the "Getting Started" section above.

Note: If at any point while practicing EZ, you feel like you aren't having fun with it anymore, then perhaps EZ isn't for you. One of the biggest reasons to play EZ is to have fun, so if that's not happening I'd highly recommend dropping it until a later time, up to you though If your reason for playing with EZ is to improve your low AR reading, there are other methods of doing that too, so don't push yourself too hard to stick with this mod Having fun with osu! is the most important thing.

Beatmap Packs
When learning new skills in osu!, it can often be hard to know what type of maps you should be playing in order to optimally train those new skills. Lucky for you though, the EZ Mod Training Pack has that sorted for you! Once you are more proficient at using the mod, you can give the Gimmick & Readin Pack a go too

EZ Mod Training Pack:
While you should be playing maps you enjoy at your level over anything else, this training pack's goal is to provide you with the types of maps you should be playing at each stage in your EZ mod journey, with a range of difficulties in each stage (from 3* - 7*). The pack is split up into these three sections: Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert. These sections/difficulty slowly get harder as you progress; In the beginning of the pack you play slow, rhythmically simple maps, and slowly go all the way up to challenging-to-read and rhythmically complex maps. For more information on the pack itself and how to use it, have a look at the "Info" text files located inside the pack


| Mediafire | Google Drive |

Gimmick & Reading Pack:
This pack contains (in my opinion) some of the best "Gimmick" beatmaps around, as well as a few general reading maps that fit in with the other maps quite well. I wouldn't recommend trying to play these without some experience with EZ first, they're quite the challenge!


| Mediafire | Google Drive |

Other ResourcesHere are some other resources that may help you with your EZ mod journey.

osu!Trainer:
osu!Trainer is a program developed by the user FunOrange that allows you to make difficulty and bpm edits of maps easily and efficiently. When it comes to EZ, this can be useful for making AR edits of maps you want to practice. While you can already easily do this through the editor, you may find it easier to use this application instead. There are lots of other things you can do with it as well, so it's useful for general practicing too.

osu!Lazer:
osu!Lazer is essentially the next osu! client that's been in development for a long time, and is close to being in a state that is better than the current client (osu!stable). A very useful tool inside of osu!Lazer is its "Difficulty Adjust" mod that, as its name may suggest, allows you to edit a map's difficulty settings. This is the most efficient way to make edits to a map's AR etc to help with EZ mod practice by far. On top of this, for most mods in osu!lazer, you can customize each mod's values. This would be very useful for EZ mod, however currently the only thing you can change with EZ is the number of bonus lives you have. However, in the future, this may change as Lazer is, obviously, still very much in development. So look out for that

List of all previously linked resources:

1. Almost's Guide on EZ mod - community/forums/topics/921950
2. EZ mod osu!wiki article - wiki/en/Game_modifier%2FEasy
3. -GN's 2018 skin - https://osuskins.net/skin/nrnkSwg/
4. LegitWubz' Edited Default Skin - https://www.reddit.com/r/OsuSkins/comments/ej3htj/osu_default_skin_plus/
5. My EZ Mod Training Pack - https://www.mediafire.com/file/7df3yu7pzc2427h/EZ_Mod_Training_Pack.zip/file
6. My Gimmick and Reading Pack - https://www.mediafire.com/file/5rk8eco67vals8h/Reading_%2526_Gimmick_Pack.zip/file