Stefan wrote:
You shouldn't add any jumps in Normal Difficulties at all.
Generalizations like that make me sad. No player in the world reads maps by putting a ruler between two notes measuring out the spacing. It always depends on how the jumps are used and how intuitive they are to play.
Talking about the actual map, I do understand the concept behind it. Jumps are used in a way mappers typically use them in any diff higher than Normal. From the perspective of an experimental mapper it doesn't make much sense to use an entirely different concept (distance snapping all the way through) in the Normal if anything up from Hard is allowed to have big jumps after sliders, so that concept is used for the Normal too. It is also used consistently and the patterns are clearly structured and make sense.
Now there is the problem that in most situations there is a direction change directly after the jumps, leading to setups that might be very hard to read for newbie players. Just to give a few examples:
00:04:887 (1,2) -
00:07:287 (1,2) -
00:13:887 (3,1) -
For each of those, the tail of the second slider is closer to the previous object than it's head. This is repeated throughout the whole map. That means this Normal requires the skill of differentiating between sliderhead and slidertail via approach circles / numbers on sliders, which is a skill most Normal difficulty players don't have.
Another problem I can see is that many of the jumps are almost twice as big as the regular distance spacing, which means the 2/1-gaps could be misread as 1/1-jumps too (or the other way around, but 1/1-jumps are used much more frequently and introduced way earlier). There are different ways professional players read complicated rhythms like that, paying close attention to approach circles (very hard) and playing after intuition (objects will more likely start on a white / red tick than a blue tick for example (for higher diffs), which would mean objects will more likely start on beat 1 or 3 than beat 2 or 4 transfered to this particular map) are two of them. The map is not made in a way that would contradict these strategies, but those are skills that most Normal difficulty players don't have either.
I would say the difficulty does well at what it's trying to do but it doesn't fit as the lowest difficulty of the mapset due to the advanced skills required to play it that I explained above. I would recommend to add an Easy difficulty that introduces jump usage, but doesn't do the things I mentioned above (meaning it DOESN'T use jumps with direction changes directly after and it DOESN'T use jumps twice as big as the standard spacing). That would most likely be the best option.
I'm sorry for my complex sentences here, I didn't really know how to put it more simple though.