Hey guys,
I normally play Taiko mode and occasionally like to play CtB with hidden on. Anyway, occasionally I download a beatmap that only has Mania maps, and today I thought to give them a try. I'm unable to play anything beyond 4 key; I struggle to coordinate a thumb into my play to hit my space key.

Is there a recommended list of maps I can practice on, or a recommended skin? I feel my main issues are currently:

• Short Sliders
  Single beats while holding a slider
  Coordinating more than 4 fingers

Thanks guys!

Hey mate, i think you should take a look drace's guide on mania!
Link: t/146615
Also check out; t/147552

That's good, thanks man. Drace covers finger independence well so I think I'll try and work on that.

The first and most important thing: don't be afraid to do badly. Particularly when doing something you've not done before.

Short sliders - I'm always surprised that people seem to have difficulty with these, especially when they're not flowing straight from one to the next (which they won't in auto-converts). Just remember to pay attention to the end as well as the start, and listen to the song. If the map fits the music properly (which most maps created in the last couple of years will do) then both the start and end of the note should match up with something in the music. These will often be fairly similar throughout a section of the music (at least in easy difficulty), enabling you to get used to how long they last for a given song and get into a rhythm. Also, you may find that using f3 and f4 to adjust the slider speed helps with this. A faster speed means the notes will be stretched out more, enabling you to time them better. Be careful, though - it also means that each note won't be on the screen as long, which may mean you can't keep up with what to press when. Go too fast and you'll be missing any single hit notes. Find a balance that works for you, and remember that different BPM of the song will mean that a different speed is better. For example, I have 13 as a sort of default speed, but will go down to 11 for a fast song, or anything up to 23 for a slow song. There's even one song that I played at 39 speed.

Single beats while holding a slider typically come in three forms:
1 - Note at the same time as a slider ends. These things are typically only found in maps made for mania. You just press the single beat as you let go of the hold. Easy (usually).
2 - Regular spaced notes throughout the hold, on the same key every time. These tend to show up only on autoconverts (most frequently on hard difficulties), and will divide the hold up into regular intervals. As they haven't been mapped they sometimes don't match with the music at all, which can be seriously annoying. If they do fit, though, they tend to be fairly easy, at least after a bit of practice.
3 - Long notes. These are on maps made for mania, and involve holds with beat notes or even other holds at the same time. The good news is they will fit the music. The bad news is they can dance all over the place, often causing you to let go of your hold by accident, or just get completely lost. This has a huge amount of flexibility, and as such also has a huge range of difficulties. The harder the map, the more difficult you can expect them to be. Easy maps often won't have them at all.

As for doing more than 4 fingers - personally I would recommend you practice on 5 key (for thumb use) and 6 key (for reading wider maps). Do both at the same time. Once you get comfortable with both, try putting the two together on some easier 7 key maps, and then gradually go up in difficulty on all of 5, 6 and 7k. Don't ask me about 8k as I haven't really grown used to it myself yet, and there are hardly any 8k maps around either. Lots of people talk down on the ability of auto-convert maps to help you learn mania, but for this I would actually strongly recommend them. There are a lot more of them (particularly of 5k), and the easy/normal maps tend to be easier than any mania maps, which is really what you want when learning to use different key combinations, with the only problems being the thing I mentioned in the second part of the one above (which you will rarely find in normal and almost never in easy difficulties).

As I said at the start, though, the most important thing is to not be afraid to do badly. Quite a lot of people learn how to play 4 key maps, try out 5-7k, and find they get a lower score than they would playing that map with 4k mod on. Then they say they can't play 7k, which of course becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Don't be ashamed of that D or C rank, or even that outright fail. That's just space for future improvement, and soon you may find yourself looking at local rankings like this, which is a tremendously satisfying record of your progress: http://osu.ppy.sh/ss/957794

kuuderes_shadow wrote:

The first and most important thing: don't be afraid to do badly. Particularly when doing something you've not done before.

This is the truth! If you want to improve, you're doing to need to go out of your comfort zone. I've seen many people try to learn mania, but give up saying "it's too hard" because they couldn't S an easy map. Don't consider anything worse than an A a bad score. Go play stuff you can hardly play. Even though you get low scores, you will get much better at the game much faster.

kuuderes_shadow wrote:

Short sliders - I'm always surprised that people seem to have difficulty with these, especially when they're not flowing straight from one to the next (which they won't in auto-converts).

Honestly, holds in autoconverts are more difficult than in mania maps. Most autoconverts end their holds early, or have them start and end on different sounds.

kuuderes_shadow wrote:

Just remember to pay attention to the end as well as the start, and listen to the song.

This is also very good advice. Mania maps are very accurate to the song. WAY more accurate than any maps in any other game mode (this is not something you can argue, mania is the only game mode which allows you to have notes following more than one rhythm at the same time). Listening to the song and trying to figure out which instruments certain notes are following makes it much easier to follow the patterns.

kuuderes_shadow wrote:

If the map fits the music properly (which most maps created in the last couple of years will do) then both the start and end of the note should match up with something in the music.

In proper mania songs, holds should almost always only be placed on sounds that last for a while. In standard you can get away with placing a slider that starts and ends on a kick drum sound. In mania, you should almost never do that (I don't use absolutes because there's almost always an exception).

kuuderes_shadow wrote:

Also, you may find that using f3 and f4 to adjust the slider speed helps with this. A faster speed means the notes will be stretched out more, enabling you to time them better. Be careful, though - it also means that each note won't be on the screen as long, which may mean you can't keep up with what to press when. Go too fast and you'll be missing any single hit notes. Find a balance that works for you, and remember that different BPM of the song will mean that a different speed is better. For example, I have 13 as a sort of default speed, but will go down to 11 for a fast song, or anything up to 23 for a slow song. There's even one song that I played at 39 speed.

This is something I consider very important. Finding a speed you are comfortable with makes a very big difference. I started off like this:

140 - 150 BPM - speed 11
150 - 160 BPM - speed 13
160 - 170 BPM - speed 12

etc.

Now I've increased my speeds so that for 150 BPM I use either 17 or 18.

kuuderes_shadow wrote:

Single beats while holding a slider typically come in three forms:
1 - Note at the same time as a slider ends. These things are typically only found in maps made for mania. You just press the single beat as you let go of the hold. Easy (usually).
2 - Regular spaced notes throughout the hold, on the same key every time. These tend to show up only on autoconverts (most frequently on hard difficulties), and will divide the hold up into regular intervals. As they haven't been mapped they sometimes don't match with the music at all, which can be seriously annoying. If they do fit, though, they tend to be fairly easy, at least after a bit of practice.
3 - Long notes. These are on maps made for mania, and involve holds with beat notes or even other holds at the same time. The good news is they will fit the music. The bad news is they can dance all over the place, often causing you to let go of your hold by accident, or just get completely lost. This has a huge amount of flexibility, and as such also has a huge range of difficulties. The harder the map, the more difficult you can expect them to be. Easy maps often won't have them at all.

The term "long notes" or LNs isn't specific to holds with beats or other holds at the same time. This is just another name for holds/sliders that o2jam players or people who played other games sometimes use instead of calling them "holds" or "sliders". Here's a better set of categories:

1 - Holds with regularly spaced notes in them. These are only usually found when playing standard osu! maps in mania. These like he said, sometimes the notes can be off sync from the sounds in the music, making the confusing to play. If you see something like this in a mania specific map, either the mapper doesn't know what they're doing and is copying what they see in auto-converted maps, or there's a specific reason that the mapper decided to make all the notes during the hold on the same key (usually this means that the sound that the note is for is repeating itself over and over).
2 - Notes at the beginning or end of holds. Sometimes these will show up when you play standard osu! maps in mania, but they can also appear in mania specific maps. These are relatively easy, since you're not actually pressing a note while you're holding the key; only at the beginning or end of the hold.
3 - Layered patterns with holds. In mania specific maps, it's very common to have more than one rhythm happening at once. You could break this up into lots of different categories if you wanted to. Because mania maps usually follow the music accurately, it's very common that you might have a hold that is timed to a long sound, and then notes timed to something like the drums that are happening at the same time as the long sound.

This video is a good example of layered patterns. There are sections with long holds, sections with short holds, sections with notes layered during long holds, and sections with notes and short holds layered together:




4 - LN walls/inverse mapping. These are the most advanced patterns in mania maps. These patterns are made up almost entirely of holds, sometimes they are only made up of holds. You won't encounter these for a long time, so no use worrying about them.

kuuderes_shadow wrote:

As for doing more than 4 fingers - personally I would recommend you practice on 5 key (for thumb use) and 6 key (for reading wider maps). Do both at the same time. Once you get comfortable with both, try putting the two together on some easier 7 key maps, and then gradually go up in difficulty on all of 5, 6 and 7k. Don't ask me about 8k as I haven't really grown used to it myself yet, and there are hardly any 8k maps around either. Lots of people talk down on the ability of auto-convert maps to help you learn mania, but for this I would actually strongly recommend them. There are a lot more of them (particularly of 5k), and the easy/normal maps tend to be easier than any mania maps, which is really what you want when learning to use different key combinations, with the only problems being the thing I mentioned in the second part of the one above (which you will rarely find in normal and almost never in easy difficulties).

The single most important thing when you start learning to play mania is learning to respond properly to seeing a note or a hold coming down the screen. Before you've learned that skill properly, it doesn't really matter what you play. I suggest playing a mixture of mania specific maps as well as auto-converted maps. People talk down on auto-convert maps because the patterns that appear in them are absolutely terrible, and feel nothing like real mania maps and are not nearly as fun to play because the patterns aren't made by someone specifically to be played in mania. Auto-converted maps will teach you how to respond to single notes, single holds, and simple chords (multiple notes at the same time). However, once you've gotten to be able to do reasonably well on something harder than Easy and Normal difficulties, I highly suggest focusing more on playing mania specific maps. The reason for this is that just because you can respond to single notes or very simple chords doesn't mean you've really learned to play mania very well. You've only scratched the surface of what mania has to offer at that point. Once you feel comfortable playing some of the easier maps on entozer's list of maps please try to use these to improve. The patterns you will encounter will be more difficult than auto-converts, but they will teach you to be much better at mania, much faster than using auto-converts.

kuuderes_shadow wrote:

As I said at the start, though, the most important thing is to not be afraid to do badly. Quite a lot of people learn how to play 4 key maps, try out 5-7k, and find they get a lower score than they would playing that map with 4k mod on. Then they say they can't play 7k, which of course becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Don't be ashamed of that D or C rank, or even that outright fail. That's just space for future improvement, and soon you may find yourself looking at local rankings like this, which is a tremendously satisfying record of your progress: http://osu.ppy.sh/ss/957794

I bolded that because It's probably the single most important advice you've given. most of the stuff I play, I get a D or a C on, and I use nofail all the time. It's the fastest way to improve. And yes, local scores are very very useful for tracking your improvement. I spend 95% of my time looking at local scores.

Some people say that they don't want to bother practicing hard stuff because they have enough fun playing really easy stuff. Please don't do that. The most fun you can have in mania is playing the really challenging maps. The harder a map is, the more interesting and fun it can be if you can play it.

To clarify a few things, and recount my own story:

First, I'm sorry if I use inaccurate or incorrect terminology. I've not been here all that long and never played beat games before this so I just use terms to describe what I see other people using them to describe.

The "something in the music" could refer to another beat or the end of the note. I was trying to talk about autoconverts and mania specific maps at the same time. Yes, there are a few converts that have notes that end a bit earlier than they should because the original standard map switches between one slider and the next. They aren't all that common but they are there. But personally I find them easier to get straight 300s on than the streams of one hold leading into another leading into another, particularly if they leap all over the place or quickly double back on yourself. But maybe that's just me.

Everything I said is based off my own experience. When I started I just went through the list and gradually downloaded about 60-70 songs that I liked. They were the only things I used for the early stages of my training. There were no mania mapsets in there. But there were 4k, 5k, 6k and 7k maps and I tried out all of them and improved rapidly. My first S rank came on day 3, on my 9th playthrough of that beatmap. I had got a D the first time - I usually did. During this time I was basically learning how to identify the notes coming down at me and learning to respond to them. I cared more about getting max combo than getting a good % accuracy, and was constantly pushing myself to hit every note. I think this was the right idea - once you can hit everything on easier maps, then you can start aiming to hit them well. I was only playing easy and normal difficulties at the time, other than a couple of insanes I played through just to see what they were like. SS seemed out of my reach forever, and I wasn't too bothered, until on day 7 I suddenly and unexpectedly got a single 200 away from SS. Convinced that I could reach it with a bit of practice/luck, I replayed the song with perfect mod on until the counter in the top left was telling me I had replayed it a hundred times. It was a complete waste of time. I didn't get my SS and didn't even get better at the map in question. Replaying the same map more than a couple of times in a row won't help you learn.

My actual first SS rank came on day 14. The very next day my tally went up to 5. By this stage I'd started keeping track of my highest score in each song, which at the time was what made up total score. Improving that without adding new songs became my main aim, and gradually the millions ticked by, getting my average score far higher than I had thought possible. Eventually, all bar two songs were on 950k+ and most had multiple S-ranks. I decided I wasn't going to improve much more for a while, and started downloading more songs, again limited to things that I liked. One of these was my first mania map - this one. I was able to get an A in the 4k NM first time, thanks to the practice I had got on those autoconverts. By that time I saw an A rank in the easiest mode of a song as dreadful, though. It was a fairly good map to have as my first mania map, though, as there weren't many patterns that I didn't already know so it was fairly comfortable to play.

It was around that point that I started mass-downloading beatmap packs. I wanted to be the first person to complete at least one mode of every song. Noone else seemed to be going for it - only smallboat was playing a lot and he (being a 4k player) had map sets that he couldn't complete. One of which is uni, a song which I became attached to. I've spent more time playing that than any other song (except the ones I've made myself). But, aside from a couple of things like that, there was very little to challenge me. I was only playing the easiest mode of each song, generally, seeing the others as a waste of time and effort. I had almost 7.5k songs to get through - there was no reason to go playing multiple versions of each. I wasn't even challenging myself at each song - I wanted only to complete it, not to do well (although I often did get at least an S rank in the songs), and I usually deleted entire songs after single plays. My growth progress slowed to almost nothing as a result. Then, on the 11th June the system was changed so that getting score increases in any difficulty of a map would increase your total score. However, existing scores were not added. Wanting to keep my score as close to accurate as possible, I then stopped even replaying songs that I had already done in other difficulties. My progress stopped completely, as there was nothing to challenge me any more, other than increasing the number of rainbow 300s I got.

This continued until 3 significant things happened in quick succession. First, past scores got added to the total score ranks. Suddenly there was an incentive to play other difficulties again. I started doing this, and thus started improving again. Now I will typically play all difficulties of a map that I can as soon as I play it for the first time. Second, I discovered (by accident) that F3 and F4 adjusted speeds. This had little impact on most maps, but it was revolutionary on others. There are maps where I jumped from constant D ranks to constant S ranks. That's how important this can be. The third thing was Akasha getting ranked. I had never played 8k, and couldn't see myself ever getting good at it. Even the easiest difficulty's top 50 was flooded with people playing with No Fail mod on. I gave up on the idea of ever completing it, and thus of completing every song (ironically, it was only 2 weeks later that I completed it for the first time, placing it as my lowest best-score from any song, where it has remained ever since).

Those three things kickstarted my return to the road of progress. A road which, for me, consists of playing everything - easy or hard, 4k or 8k (or anything else), auto-convert or mania specific. That variety is what I find gives me the best improvement and the most fun, and is what I'll continue to do. Sometimes I'll revisit something, and find I can get a few tens or hundreds of thousand more points than I had been able to previously, or a higher rank. And that reminds me, better than anything else (including the spreadsheet I still use to keep track of my best scores in every song), that I am constantly making progress.

Okay that was kind of long and a lot of it irrelevant, but maybe my experience can help others see for themselves what works and what doesn't.

kuuderes_shadow wrote:

First, I'm sorry if I use inaccurate or incorrect terminology. I've not been here all that long and never played beat games before this so I just use terms to describe what I see other people using them to describe.

No problem. I've been around since the very beginning of osu!mania, and I played standard before that, and I've played both stepmania and o2jam before that, so I've got about a decade of playing music games. I hope I didn't come off as harsh. I thought you did a pretty good job of explaining yourself, even if I disagreed with what you were saying. For learning the terms, and patterns in mania, I sugges you read the pattern repository at How to play Osu!Mania.

kuuderes_shadow wrote:

I was trying to talk about autoconverts and mania specific maps at the same time. Yes, there are a few converts that have notes that end a bit earlier than they should because the original standard map switches between one slider and the next. They aren't all that common but they are there. But personally I find them easier to get straight 300s on than the streams of one hold leading into another leading into another, particularly if they leap all over the place or quickly double back on yourself. But maybe that's just me.

It's very common for autoconverts to have holds in very awkward timings. You find those holds easier because you'e been exposed to them more, and have trained yourself to play them better than the mania style of holds. I'm far better at mania stye holds than autoconverts specifically because i find it much harder to predict the timing of the hold, forcing me to spend more mental effort visually checking it.

kuuderes_shadow wrote:

During this time I was basically learning how to identify the notes coming down at me and learning to respond to them. I cared more about getting max combo than getting a good % accuracy, and was constantly pushing myself to hit every note. I think this was the right idea - once you can hit everything on easier maps, then you can start aiming to hit them well.

That's exactly what you should be doing. Hitting notes comes first, accuracy comes later.

kuuderes_shadow wrote:

I was only playing easy and normal difficulties at the time, other than a couple of insanes I played through just to see what they were like. SS seemed out of my reach forever, and I wasn't too bothered, until on day 7 I suddenly and unexpectedly got a single 200 away from SS. Convinced that I could reach it with a bit of practice/luck, I replayed the song with perfect mod on until the counter in the top left was telling me I had replayed it a hundred times. It was a complete waste of time. I didn't get my SS and didn't even get better at the map in question. Replaying the same map more than a couple of times in a row won't help you learn.

Replaying the same thing over and over doesn't really make you any better, even if you do get that SS doing it. The right way to train is to go through lots of different maps, which you seem to have learned. One thing I think you put too much weight on is overall score. The reason I play mania is simple: it's fun. I don't mean competing with other peope, or trying to get some sort of personal goal (like "play every song"), I mean physically playing mania is fun. If you can learn to enjoy the game on that level, not needing to set goals, I think you would find yourself gravitating towards more challenging stuff and really trying to get good. You are still in the early stages of skill overall.

Holy f*** you guys really wrote a lot.

kuuderes_shadow you are doing everything right i think

Wishy wrote:

Holy f*** you guys really wrote a lot.

Yeah... I've got a habit of writing walls of text.