Originally Posted by
Slant
Hi, OP. I can solve your problem. Hide your action bars.
Ok, here's the long version:
Someone made an UI once without any action bars, explaining their reasoning in a video. I was curious about an interface without any main action bar displayed, just some sidebars for out of combat stuff. The explanation goes something like this:
You have your keybinds set, everything important is done via keyboard. What exactly is the reason you're still looking at the action bars? The answer is as simple as it sounds stupid: To check your cooldowns.
There are addons for that, you could write WeakAuras for them. There's a ton more efficient ways to check the cooldown of your abilities. Once you've done them (a clunky example would be a cooldown bar addon), you hide the action bars and after a couple of horrible trys, you learn to a) trust your fingers to know where each spell is on their own, b) realise that now you're bored, not having something to look at and by magic you'll notice things that you haven't noticed before, c) ideally, you'll start to learn to play your character properly.
Anticipating cooldowns by timings, getting a "feel" for when your short 6s cooldowns are ready again and just confirming that with an addon and if you put the extra 5 mins into it, you may even want to strategise the fight for your class, evaluating when you want to use which 3m cooldown (do you have a burst phase somewhere? use it then, not when it's off cooldown!).
All those things improve you as a player and make you more independent.
Edit: Meh, I can't leave this post I keep adding stuff... so here's my personal story, I'm not a super duper Top 20 raider, but I can tell you this, I'm a DK and I only need to glance at my runes/runic power to evaluate the "situation" that I am in and thus use the spells accordingly. I don't "watch" my bars or my resources, I check my current "resource status" every 2s or so, because once I've done that, I can easily predict which 2-4 or 5 spells I'm gonna cast next. That is where you want to be at. Have your class in your system so that you have 80% mind time for the boss mechanics and your raid and 20% mind time invested in your actual character, because most of that should really be done on autopilot. Classes are not hard to play these days.