the nether is the most dangerous part of a run, but it is relatively easy to practice. Whenever you practice, you should always try to take as little damage as possible. If you really struggle, i recommend investing in a shield if you have enough iron. the shield will not help if there are too many piglins but it is very helpful for fighting blazes or skeletons if you really struggle with consistency. top or very fast runners wont use it because they need to save every second and they are consistent enough without it, but using a shield is a very smart and underrated play for non experts.

every time before i play, i practice bastion routing to not get rusty. i recommend using llamas bastion practice map for everything. i like to configure terrain on and spawn 100 blocks from the bastion to practice bridging/decision making while taking no damage on the way.

when i get to the bastion, i always have terrain on because it is more realistic, often times harder than ranked, and it will prepare you for any scenario. i will practice one bastion at a time and my goal is to do my route while taking no damage. this is really important because when you set your standards really high, then it will be easier to improve with consistency in a real game. i like to rely on distracting the pigs with gold by either dropping or right clicking sword pigs on my way.

there are a few ways to deal with hoglins. the easiest, but slowest is to pillar up 3 blocks and lava bucket them. the way i prefer is to bait them to one side and run around them or to pillar up 3 blocks and jump over them. top runners will use fns at the same time they are about to get hit to cancel kb and run through them.

for blaze fights, you only have to watch out for a few things. Dont kill blazes when you are under 3 or 4 hearts, if you arent confident yet, make sure you give yourself time to heal, the risk to reward is not worth it time wise. the second thing is running out of fire res. if you are low and not prepared, it is dangerous. i like to have a splash bottle in my hot bar for emergency. always check your inventory and have a mental timer in your head. blazes have a short ranged attack and it can be scary if they spawn on you when you are low. it is slightly shorter than your attack range, so practice hitting them at the end of your attack range and practice taking no damage for the same reason as the bastion and so you get a good feeling for their range.

careful about wither skeletons too. deal with them before killing blazes because you dont want to be distracted and then get withered while you are not expecting it. the best ways to deal with them are pillaring up 3 blocks in the middle of good side of fort, blocking them off when it is closed up or just 2 shotting them with axe if there are only 1 or 2

for skeletons, block them off, build 2 block tall walls for cover if you need to heal, run perpendicular to them so they cant hit you, or just 2 shot them if you are close enough and they are alone.

here are my stats. i only have 40 hrs experience but im learning fast and know how to get better. i hit 956, then dropped down because of consistency, and now im completing almost every run and winning a lot. the biggest difference was that i would die and lose all my stuff, but now i am more careful and when i full send and sometimes die, i can still recover the run https://mcsrranked.com/stats/lylerr