Practice,Rotations, and DPS

[Alaray]

Honestly, it's all just practice and memorization -- I'm not what I consider top tier or close to it, but back when I was raiding as a brand new everything in Sigma, I did the Learn Rotation step, including practicing openers/reopeners (which lead to a *big* improvement on its own), then learned more about maintaining uptime through mechanics (which mostly requires learning those mechanics first, though I didn't do any greeding/perfect gap closers to not miss a gcd for an "off the boss" moment, but tried to minimize the time off the boss as I could while not causing a problem for the group).

When it comes to learning to cheese mechanics (be it using a group strat to ignore a mechanic with stacked CD's, or a particular unconventional formation/strat, or trying to see how many gcd's you *can* get before you get punished, or how *close* your gap closer has to be to not miss a gcd etc...) I'd say learn these sorts of things in parties designed for it (I never did parse parties, but I am making the assumption these would be the styles of party for these, not so much the weekly clear/farms since the mistakes could just wipe the group and that defeats the purpose of that group, vs. just doing an efficient safe strategy/safer movement -- like, on Leviathan back when, there were 2 strats where the tanks did not have to peel off the boss at all, but if you did this without being REALLY good at timing and REALLY understanding the mech/server function, you'd probably kill everyone -- in the second strat [okay the first would be closer to greed], if you did it without warning you would kill everyone as it required heavy mitigation from your team, just as examples of what I mean).

I did the latter more in my static, though as a tank my messups rarely outright killed me (but I also asked if I could try some things here and there, if I got the go ahead I would and summarily wipe everyone :B) though my group was a bit more on the casual side so we didn't do uptime strats/heavily optimize our burst windows/raid buffs/play what was meta (for ex. I was a DRK in sigmascape :^) ). (But, for instance, I didn't do things I understood I would screw up a lot, and I didn't push for optimization strats unless others were interested)

(and there's potions/potion timings etc.. which, for the second, I'm pretty terrible at doing and usually straight up forget -- kinda never forced myself too hard to learn since my group was killing everything quite fine at this point, and no one was particularly interested in doing runs in BiS to optimize more and see how well we could do)

It *really* just boils down to practicing to get better, reading up on things you feel uncertain about, and comparing logs (like amount of casts etc...) and trying to, as you can, emulate. There's probably a lot *more* one can do than I described, but what I am describing took me from being, back in Sigmascape, a "Grit only, because I'm a tank" DRK into getting into some orange numbers that tier, and close-ish in the tier after while really far behind and learning WAR (and *almost* more consistently on some fights in Eden's Gate, Verse I just subbed in for a friend's enrage group on furor after I told them a lot I never stepped foot in the tier and had non-penta melded crafted to my name lol)

That said, though -- grey/green is fine (esp late in a tier where your gear is probably terrible compared to the people farming, and you still need to learn the mechs + learn your timings with those mechanics + just being new in general) and shouldn't be as discouraging as it is for some people. Even then -- regularly speaking -- blue's also completely a-okay to be at in general (I say mostly as people tend to put *so much value* on parse percentiles, that sometimes, just doing the fight safely/efficiently/clearing consistently is more important).

Oh! And Statics aren't necessary, they can help if you're willing to find one on your level, but doing Learning parties for the parts of the fight you're on is plenty enough. And once you feel confident you have the fight down/been to enrage -- then Clear parties!

that said I rambled a lot to just kinda say:

tl;dr: Memorization and practice is what helps the most. Don't feel bad about your performance, and just try and do your best and work to do better the next go around!