some dumb rare bird in WoD murked me like 4 times while i was levelling because i was too zoned in to see its frickin hour long cast
sometimes ill wonder why my abilities arent working either only to realize im targeting a corpse, THIS IS TRAGIC
plz help me kind people 
i don’t know how to help you except say try to memorize your hotkeyed abilities so you don’t have to look at them to use them
oh well I know where they are and what they do, I look at it for cooldowns and random procs
do you guys just track that stuff in your head?
maybe try to hone your peripheral vision so you don’t have to stare right at it to see the procs and cooldowns
or get a mod that says when you get procs and cooldowns near the center of the screen. i use MikScrollingBattleText which can do this. Although really retail is pretty good about showing visual indicators when things proc these days.
Easiest way is to get a weakaura indicator or other addon for the cooldowns you are worried about and put it in your field of vision
This is the process I followed back in the time. It might not be the perfect path, but it’s worked for me and a couple other people.
Step 1: Create a keybinding layout that feels natural and logic. Keep your rotational abilities close to your fingers (keys like 1-4, E, R, Q, F, Z, X and C, plus shift combinations).
Step 2: Play with that keybinding layout for a while. At least a week, until you feel comfortable.
Step 3: Add cooldowns or important abilities into some Wakaura near the center of your screen, or just create a single action bar with big buttons somewhere visible and place the important cooldowns there.
Step 4: Hide your action bars. There are plenty of addons for that. ElvUI is nice for a full UI rework, but if you prefer to keep things simple, Bartender and Dominos both can help you with this. You can keep some bar in a corner with stuff you rarely use or consumable, but hide all your combat bars.
Step 5: Play like this for a while, until you feel like you can use all of your abilities without looking at them.
Step 6 (optional): Make your action bars visible again. You might want to keep them small and unintrusive, but that’s up to you.
oh ok I thought weakauras was for boss and mob mechanics
it can make sounds right?
There are plenty of Weakauras packs that are specifically designed for this. Go to Wago dot io and search for your spec. Afenar is an author that comes to mind, but there are others.
Yet, I know this can be intimidating, but I prefer to make my own Weakauras, at least for my main.
WA packs often pack too much information, at least for my taste. But, it’s still a good idea to grab a pack to start.
dang thanks, hiding the action bar is a great idea
guess I need to spend some time cleaning up the ui then thanks a lot guys
Same, they are overloaded and have too much going on that I don’t really need.
But, you can also just grab the pack, and disable the components you don’t need and keep only the parts you like. Some of the authors really do work wonders with certain class mechanic tracking.
Weakauras isn’t really an addon that does anything specific, it’s an interface for making / importing addons in game directly instead of downloading them as separate entities through curse. Weakauras can do anything an addon can, it just might be a bit less efficient at doing it.
What people are specifically talking about is UI weakauras. There are other addons that can handle UI but the general point is you want to move the things you care about being able to see up closer to the middle of your screen. Personally I would suggest leaving about a centimetre below your character and then moving your health bar, enemy health bar, and some sort of UI element that shows you the cooldowns of your spells around there.
There’s tonnes of ways to go about this, but the general idea is to move things you need to look at closer to where your eyes naturally rest / where things are happening. You don’t wanna be looking at the bottom of your screen or into the top left / right because you’ll miss what’s going on infront of you.
Yes, that’s correct.
Just so OP knows, you can hide auras by typing /wa, finding the specific aura you want to disable, selecting it, going to the “Load” tab and check “Never”.
The original point of weakauras was to make the obtuse UI for those elements (CDs, Buff/Debuff Stacks etc.) more visible and alert you better of their presence.
That’s how I use it to this day.
I also make almost all my own auras, and the only one I use that I did not make (LFG Satchel Alert), I modified to only alert me of the DPS queue bonus.
The dominant UI design for people who tinkers their UI, and for a good reason, goes like this:
I have an action bar up with my main abilities i use up by character . My CDs and things that arent really used during combat are the only things i have to take my eye off my character for . I had the same problem of tunneling my abilities a few years ago . Moving an action bar up in my field of vision helped tremendously for mechanics.
Keybinds and muscle memory.
It’s like how most of the tech-savvy crowd doesn’t need to look at the keyboard when they’re typing. Same thing.
Sounds like you need to adjust your UI better. Your UI sould centralize all the info you need. That’s why you see top end players with their health bars and the enemies’s health bars near their action bars so their eyes don’t have to move far. Try that and see if it helps.
I glance at my hot bars like I glance at my car mirrors. Familiarity with your abilities, their locations, the length of their cooldowns, and your rotation will allow you to spend less time staring at your bars and more time watching out for what’s happening around you.
Move it to be more central to the screen and not at the bottom usually helps the most.
OP this the best advice any of us could ever give you.