Easy Mod: How and Why

The Easy mod is notorious for actually making most maps harder, creating massive overlaps and unreadable patterns, all in exchange for nearly halving your final score. But if you take the time to learn it and take advantage of its special features, is it really that useless?

What is Easy Mod?

The first thing that goes through peoples' minds when seeing the Easy mod is "Oh, wonderful! This'll help me out a lot when I'm having trouble passing! And indeed, it does – the lowered HP drain, increased circle size and 2 additional lives are a great boon to those who are starting out. While players on an [Easy] difficulty will most definitely be helped out, and most on [Normal] difficulties as well, there comes a time when a player will attempt to use their pal Easy Mod on a higher difficulty. "What's going on?, they cry – the reduced approach rate and increased circle size has started to have a much more distinguished effect! Patterns that were previously readable have now become a mental challenge to try and figure out the order of the notes, and the decreased overall difficulty means that missing one note is quite likely to cause the rest of the pattern to be missed as well. Even if the player pushes on and tries to use the Easy mod on an [Insane] difficulty, the overlaps and massive circle density are almost sure to alienate the player further, to the point where they realize that maps are much easier without the poorly-named Easy mod. Besides, even getting past all of that, the Easy mod still gives your score a 50% reduction, leaving no chance of beating someone who got a full combo without any mods.

Why should I even use it, then?

What most people never realize is that, when trained and applied properly, the Easy mod is an incredible tool, allowing players to get much higher combos and better scores than their modless peers. HP drain too high? Easy takes care of that! Having trouble aiming? Bigger circles always help! OD9 getting you down? Why not make it OD4.5? Even if a map still isn't quite easy enough after that, the extra lives will let you push through an extra difficult part and go on to complete the map. As for the 50% score decrease, NoFail does that too, and for no significant advantage – if you can't pass the map normally, why not use Easy instead of NoFail, and rack up a few more points along the way? And let's not forget how amazing it feels to perform so well that you end up with a top 50 rank using the Easy mod! In fact, the main reason why people opt not to use Easy, and the huge defining factor in its special form of difficulty is:

Some maps have very small circles and strange patterns, requiring weird mouse movements and heavy precision...

But with the Easy mod, the circles become much bigger, allowing the player to simply move their cursor in a straight line to hit the notes.

Low Approach Rate – how to read it?

Here is where most people get stuck; on complicated maps, especially ones with many overlapping patterns, trying to figure out how to hit the notes in the correct order is a nightmare. The best way to get better at reading this is the same way you get better at just about anything else – practice, practice, practice! I recommend using Easy mod on Normal difficulties until you are comfortable with the slow speed, then move up to Hard, and then finally Insane. There's no need to rush – just take your time and it'll come to you eventually.

Here are a few tips to make reading the Easy mod a little bit easier, too:

• Know the map's rhythm. This is the most important one by far. Sightreading with the Easy mod is definitely possible, but it is very difficult, and requires lots of training. For people trying to learn to use it, I heavily recommend that you practice on a song that you already know very well. Remember the general flow of each part of the map, what patterns may end up overlapping and being difficult, etc. Then play with Easy mod, and try to remember how the map goes and play it along to the rhythm you remember, rather than trying to read every circle for what it is and figuring it out on the fly.
• Count by combo numbers. This one is a strong second to know. Some skins remove combo numbers altogether, and this is a very terrible idea for playing Easy mod! Until you get completely comfortable with reading slow approach circles, combo numbers will be your best friend. If you're about to hit note #4 in a combo, then next obviously comes #5, so scan the playfield ahead of time in order to locate that note. Proceed onward to do the same for #6, #7, and so on.
• Use multiple contrasting combo colors. This may seem a bit strange, but it ties heavily in with the previous point. Some maps have very short combos, which make it hard to use combo numbers – they keep resetting back to 1! For this reason, make sure that you are using a skin where the combo colors are easily distinguishable, even via peripheral vision, and have the order of the colors (e.g. red -> blue -> green -> orange -> red) absolutely committed to heart.
• When in doubt, memorize! Even after years of practice with the Easy mod, and using all the above tips, there will still be some patterns that are just so obtuse and complex that they're impossible to read properly. In these cases, don't even bother reading them – just remember the pattern! Open up that pattern in the editor, and use Test mode to play it over and over again until you know the exact cursor movements required to hit it, then practice it again with Easy mod; you may very well find that your hand still remembers, even if you don't clearly, and you'll hit patterns you wouldn't have dreamed of.

What are some good practice maps?

Hmm... now this is a tough one. Really, there's no one standard of maps that are simple and fun to read. I personally really enjoy playing Kirby MIXes with Easy, as they contain very few overlaps, and were created for AR8 (rather than the modern standard of AR9) so it's less of a stretch to use the lower AR. Other maps include anything by mtmcl, thanks to the simple patterns and lack of overlap, as well as Avicii - Levels (Nightcore Mix), which, although not the greatest map, is very simple and repetitive, and great to help ease into the Easy mod. I highly recommend playing maps that you're personally comfortable with, though, as anything I can suggest may very well be unreadable to you!

And finally, what skin works well?

You may be surprised to hear this, but in my humble opinion, the best skin for playing Easy mod is none other than the osu! default skin! The combo colors are very distinct from one another, the combo numbers are very readable, and the hitbursts don't completely hide circles, while still being visible, which is a huge help for Easy+Hidden mods. Unfortunately, I won't go to very much detail about that, since Easy+Hidden is a completely different beast, and it would nearly take another article entirely to explain its nuances. I highly, highly recommend avoiding it until you are very proficient at Easy alone...

If you have any further questions, feel free to ask me via PM, either in-game or on the forums. I'm always happy to discuss the Easy mod and help out those who want to learn it!

—MillhioreF