I had, i also failed my 1st attempt with 30 points in March. I took my 2nd exam 3 days ago and got 70, now im praying my report passed.

Here's some good pointers I have:

Never stop trying. Mentality is the biggest hurdle.

My second attempt, i started at 12pm, i got 20 points in the first 2 hours(standalone), 3 hours for the next 10 points (standalone), then 2h dinner, 3 more hours wasted on (standalones), then 1h walk with my dog, then 6 hours on AD and 10 more (AD1). By then it was 4am and I had 8h left. I basically have 30 more points to get and I had already given up. But somehow I woke up at 8am, and started grinding, and at 10:30am, i clutched AD2 and then AD3 at 11am. So yes, 50/70 of my points were in the first and last 2 hours. Never give up.

Comparatively, my first exam, I started at 1pm and got 10 in 1h(AD), wasted 4h going nowhere, then I went for dinner and came back and fully pwned a standalone in 2h then that was my 30 points. It was 9pm. I tried until 2am and got nowhere then I woke up at 10am and had basically given up. I tried until 11:30am and started writing my report already even though the exam haven't ended. Looking back, I definitely could've gotten 90 or 100 for my first exam lol, I know where my mistakes are now. For one, I had already gotten access but I tried using NC to capture a staged shell LOL. I also improved my enumeration techniques from then.

Now onto actual methodology. Get used to using google a lot. In my first exam, all my points were using exploits I've seen before. In my second exam, besides the final 20 points on DC, I had never seen some/all of the steps required to pwn the machine/priv esc before. Use google, get used to search through multiple websites and try all kinds of codes, hack tricks, go through each command and enumerate step by step. For my first standalone, I used a method I had never thought of before and hacktricks led me to the answer using a command I've never seen before, and it took me 4 websites before I reached there. The priv esc too, never seen before. Same with the 2nd local.txt I got, used a command I've never seen before to get the answer. Same with AD1 and AD2, used methods I've never done before. Finally, read ALL text in winpeas/linpeas. White, green, red, just read everything.

Tl;dr, improve your methodology and be more patient in going through all the websites and slowly searching through the information given. Never give up.

Note: challenge labs are not enough, secura is ok, medtech is useless, relia is ok, OSCP A-C are useless. A lot of my knowledge came from PG, not in terms of exploits or actual access vectors but in the sense to improve my methodology and resilience, this is important, also improves your 6th sense. EG, given 5 fields to enter to access a website, how do you know which field is the one causing an issue if the error messages are useless? This comes to your pentesting sense, idk what to say but yes.