OutDPS!

This was such good advice, I had to give it its own post. Thanks to Bristal, who wrote this in the comments section of this post:

As a player who has raided and done heroics after leveling completely solo (& addonless & guildless) to 80, there is MUCH to know about grouping before needing boss mechanics or any of the other stuff above. All that is very very valuable, but is raiding 201-301.

For an 80 who has never grouped:

GROUPING 101
1. GUILD – Try to find a friendly, helpful guild who will help you learn the mechanics of grouping. Many guilds have websites that will describe their goals. Google WoW guild and your server and remember that guilds are faction-specific (which strangely hadn’t occured to me).

Being in a guild will give you a pool of (hopefully) receptive players you can ask to group with.

2. ADDONS – If you haven’t used addons before, learn how to install them and use them. That may take many hours. Start with small, easy ones like OMEN and Recount which are extemely important in grouping and improving your abilities. Guilds often have a nice ready-made plug-in pacs with raid-specific addons. If you really want to raid, you must use addons, and they require a bit of tinkering.

3. Group with anyone doing short group-quests. The argent tournament dailies [threat from above] & [battle of the citadel] are the easiest to do and get groups for. You get them after you finish your home faction quests, which only takes a few days.

4. READ – everything you can find on the internet about grouping mechanics.

5. DO IT – you have to start somewhere. The LFG mechanic is useless IMO, but try it. Monitor trade chat, respond with whispers, put yourself out there. Realize that most people in PUGs just want to race through an instance as fast as possible. You won’t have much time to sightsee. And be honest if you haven’t been there before, or if your skills are limited. A few seconds explanation of a bossfight can prevent embarrassing kicks from a group.

MUCH more pleasant with familiar guild names who know your limitations.

6. Start to learn your class well as posted above. Read as much as you can, learn to use training dummies, and you will improve steadily. Remember that gear upgrades help, but your skill and knowledge of fights is far and away more important and will improve your outcomes.

Thanks for the advice! It’s easy to take stuff for granted when you haven’t had to go through it in a while :)