Dang, Riince stole my words about what types of maps to play, but I've got a certain pointer anyway.
There's a few other ways to find challenging maps not mentioned in this thread yet. When the download restrictions on maps were removed, I actually mass-downloaded every map ranked since June 2013 (sorry Bancho), then went and played through most at my preferred star difficulty. Some were too easy, some were too hard, some I just didn't plain like, but the ones I thought 'hey, this is very difficult, but I think I could
conceivably FC this with enough tries,' I saved it somewhere like in a collection and played it until I did eventually FC it.
There are some easier ways however, if you don't want to just download a bunch of beatmaps (though I recommend you try it anyway). One of the easiest ways is by going to the beatmap listing and clicking "Recommended difficulty."
Also, I'm going to suggest finding maps based off of pp--I know you're not pp farming, but there's two reasons I recommend this:
a. Often, pp can be a highly good indicator of how difficult a map is and what is good for your rank.
b. Surprisingly, there are actually quite a few methods you can use to do this, which makes it a lot easier to find maps of the right difficulty:
- The traditional method of, finding people near your rank (best way is to find people near your ranking in your country on the Performance page) and copying their top ranks.
- A third party program called
osu! Trainer will allow you to find a large variety of maps for a specific amount of pp; but on the other side of this coin:
- A bot called
Tillerino will show you maps geared towards your best playstyle based off of your top ranks, with a wider range of pp given--you can use him by messaging him ingame and typing !r.
(also, Tillerino pulls his recommendations off of a site called
ppaddict, which you might be interested in checking out.)
I recommend trying all of these eventually, because it's best to be playing a wide variety of maps. For most of the time, try staying in the difficulty of 'can't FC first try but not unpassable,' but make sure you expose yourself to a large variety of mapstyles so that all aspects of your playing can improve at a similar pace (if you find one begins lagging behind to a point where you can't play, take some time to focus on improving it by playing maps that challenge it specifically). You won't notice it at first, but a few weeks time of playing heavily like this you'll realize how much you've improved when you go back to the maps you were playing today.
All in all, make sure you're having fun. If you get frustrated with a certain map, go back to it later. If you're playing too much and tiring yourself out, take a break. Make sure you're saving some time to yourself to play maps you simply have fun with and enjoy playing. It does help if you really enjoy the game.