EPTI started lotv in nov after skipping hots. I was masters in WoL but actually the majority of my games are from beta. I came back to the game sucking and being clueless. It put me in silver, and I hit masters yesterday, second season of lotv, after about 1500 games.
My micro is godawful which I think helps for teaching people since macro is easier to teach than micro. I feel like you should get the macro down first before worrying about the micro too much, too. It makes me really focus on my macro since I know I have to be ahead since I can't micro my way back into a game, and if we're on even ground they win since they're more efficient with their army than I am.
After I got used to a build in each match up and my macro was decent, I realized I was still losing a lot to the same stuff I always had lost to. The problem was that I didn't understand the strengths and weaknesses of the build, and I had poor game understanding.
Trying different builds helped me a ton because thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of the builds didn't help. I needed the empirical evidence from playing them for myself over and over. I never used to go roach rav zvz or zvt much, but I started doing that. As I got good at that, it simultaneously helped my ling bane muta play as well.
It helped zvz because I got to see how it feels combating a muta player. It helped zvt because I would be able to hold hellbats, where as with the ling queen spine no bane pig open I would usually lose to hellbats. Liberator harass was also easier to deal with with 3 ravagers. So then I'm like ok if I want to go ling bane muta I need to be super on top of scouting, and really careful with the frail lings, but in return you get a much better eco. It's probably not worth the trade until a higher level, but I'm stubborn and I just always want to make the greediest muta ling builds work. It's probably nostalgia from bw.
Copying normal masters players helped me a lot. I kept screwing myself over by trying to copy gsl players and stuff and wondering why the builds weren't work. A lot of their builds are only for best of series and because they have incredible game sense and understanding. I learned from watching literally everyone, though. Even if you can watch some diamond level and plat level games. It makes you hypothesize what the biggest mistakes were and the biggest reasons a player won. It's a mental exercise.
A lot of people's replays and streams helped me like tangsc, tlo, pig, blade55555, w0l0l0, neuro, guitarcheese, tilea, katelyn, snute, lowko and vibe. I forgot if I can edit blog posts so I hope I didn't forget anyone. I wanted to talk about livibee because something clicked around the time she released a replay pack on stream and because her play style was way different than anything I saw to that point. I can even narrow down the replay, it was a zvt where she went 3 base hydra infestor hive and wrecked a T going bio. Before my brain would have been like, "No, this can't work, you need 4 bases for hive, and plus going mainly hydra vs T bio is suicide." I tried it out in a diamond game, and I won. It wasn't so much that particular strategy as it was opening my mind to keep from getting tunnel vision.
There's so much crazy stuff that works in lotv at masters and below. You kind of have to find your own playstyle, and it's fun to try out as many different things as possible. This is how I developed my zvz build which is the only build I made myself. It's based on stuff other people advocate, but I found what was working for me and kept adjusting stuff if it didn't work.
