EPTI was totally clueless when lotv came out, and I felt super lost. I like to macro so I started out trying pig's and blade's guides because they were macro oriented and the best guides out there (and they still are). The only problem is that this encompasses the game as a whole, so my flaws in game understanding would always come out with these builds. There's just so many strategies every race can do to screw with you, from 3 rax reaper, to ling bane, to 4 gate, let alone 3 port banshee, roach allin, or adept drop. It's a lot to digest at once.
What helped me the most was realizing that you're really just racing towards 3 base saturation. Pig said he likes to have 50 drones at 5m. Vibe said for zvt, it's really a race to 3 base saturation. If the T beats zerg to it then they win. So then you have to scout to see what they're doing so you don't take too much damage from whatever harass or allin they're doing. That helped compartmentalize that section of the game for me, and it is still a gigantic section of the game.
An even easier way to break that down even more is getting good at allins. If you're like me, you're like wtf allins are no skill I want to macro and be able to sleep at night, but there's a few reasons why new players should perfect an allin:
1) They're super unforgiving with the build.
Even more so than macro builds even at masters. If you hit 10 seconds too late it can be the difference between winning or losing. If you forget a gas or mess up the build it's a loss.
2) It helps just to do something different.
I still played macro games and allin games. It helps you play more games and it's fun.
3) You get to actually see what they're doing.
This one is so dumb when I think about it, but it's helped me so much vs T. ZvT was my worst match up. When you're allining them in their base at the 4-5m mark, you get to see exactly what buildings they have and exactly how many units and their type. I started to feel a lot more comfortable with my macro game. I was surprised that pretty much instantly my macro game was able to keep up with my mmr from the bs wins I was getting from allining people, but this might be different for everyone.
Tangsc posted a ton of guides on allins if you want to try them out. I got coaching from him which helped tremendously, but I'll do another post on that sometime.
The last thing thing that will help new players is to just always go 17 hatch 17 gas 17 pool. There's actually even different ways to do with how the drones are rallied, but I'll skip that for now. This is a build you can do in every match up. You want to eliminate as many variables for losing as possible so you can focus on the stuff that matters.
