27 Diagnose Before You Drill
The chart's real use is diagnostic: find the symptom, check the skills that feed it, and train the weakest one. Run the test in the third column before committing weeks to a program.
| Symptom | Likely cause | Quick test | Go to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Misses you can't explain | Pattern processing or focus | After a miss, can you describe what the pattern actually was? | Ch. 6, Ch. 8 |
| You miss the same way every time | Cursor control | You can see exactly how you misaimed | Ch. 6 |
| 100s everywhere, UR under 100 | Offset or audio latency | Is your average hit error clearly early or late? | Ch. 7, Ch. 19 |
| 100s everywhere, UR high | Rhythm sense, finger control, or a map above your level | Does the same map one star lower give 98%? | Ch. 7, Ch. 31 |
| Bursts come out as mash; fingers lock | Finger control | Can you alternate, and start on either finger, at 150 BPM? | Ch. 6, Ch. 32 |
| Streams die after about ten notes | Tapping stamina or technique | Can you hold a 150 BPM long stream map to the end? | Ch. 13, Ch. 31 |
| Tapping is fine but you still miss streams | Flow aim or tap-aim coordination | Slow the map down: do the misses disappear? | Ch. 12 |
| Great sightread, worse on retries | Mindblock | Attempt 5 is worse than attempt 1 | Ch. 8, Ch. 14 |
| Fine in practice, shaky in a real run | Nerves | It falls apart once the combo gets big | Ch. 14 |
| Comfortable at AR 10, lost at AR 8 or 9 | Reading density, often a mod crutch | Can you read a nomod AR 9 map at your star rating? | Ch. 8, Ch. 15 |
| Clears hard maps but drops combo on easy ones | Reading and accuracy skipped on the way up | Can you full combo an AR 9 map at your star rating at 98%? | Ch. 8, Ch. 7 |
| SS-ing everything, stuck for years | Never leaving your comfort zone | Are nearly all your recent scores 99% or better? | Ch. 5, Ch. 22 |
| Flat for weeks | Too comfortable, or a narrow diet of maps | Are your recent scores nearly all 99% on one map type? | Ch. 22, Ch. 23 |
| Wrist, hand, or forearm pain | Overuse | Does it persist after a day of rest? | Stop playing and see a professional (Ch. 13) |
One symptom at a time. Fixing the weakest feeder usually improves three other things you weren't working on.
The failure chain
Every miss passes through the same sequence, and the useful question is which link broke first. The aim version of this is in Ch. 10; it generalizes to everything.
- Did you see it? No: reading speed, focus, or your screen (Ch. 8, Ch. 20).
- Did you understand the pattern? No: pattern processing (Ch. 11).
- Did you go to the right place? No: still processing, not aim.
- Did you travel the right distance? No: cursor control (Ch. 6).
- Did you arrive at the right time? No: coordination between hands (Ch. 12).
- Did the tap come out right? No: finger control or rhythm (Ch. 6, Ch. 7).
- Did it hold up? No: stamina, tension, or nerves (Ch. 13, Ch. 14).
Take: Community forums: Using the automation mods to diagnose
- One run with Relax and one with Autopilot will tell you whether a map is failing on aim or on tapping. Partly supported. Relax taps for you, so what's left is your cursor; Autopilot aims for you, so what's left is your rhythm. As a ten-minute diagnostic that is sound, and it answers link four versus link six above faster than guessing does. As practice it is a bad idea, and the book's position is unchanged: aim and tapping are tightly coupled, so training them apart is exactly what the whole-versus-part evidence argues against, and Korilak's rule against practising timing on Autopilot still stands (Ch. 7). Diagnose with them; don't train with them. 31,62,68,143
- If your hit errors are scattered rather than leaning one way, that's accuracy, not offset. Agrees with the chart. The suggested drill is to take an easy map with obvious rhythms, raise OD, and work on unstable rate where nothing else is hard, which is low-star isolation applied to timing (Ch. 7). 1,68
Drill: Straight lines
- Pick a jump-heavy map at a comfortable level and play it thinking about one thing only: moving in straight lines between objects.
- Ignore your accuracy and score entirely for these runs. You are training cursor paths, not results (Ch. 30).
- Then check a replay. Rounded, looping paths between jumps are over-aiming; straight paths that stop on the circle are the target (Ch. 29). 1,68
Train the earliest link that failed. Aim drills do nothing for a pattern you never read, and reading drills do nothing for a jump you read correctly and undershot. Most wasted practice is spent on link four when the chain broke at link two.
Be specific before you pick a program. "I can't stream 180" is four questions, not one: BPM, object count, spacing, and pattern complexity (Ch. 12). The answer changes depending on which of them actually breaks. 34
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