In regards to DBM, it’s a matter of clarity of mechanics. WoW has, for a long time now, a culture that’s been built around these addons ever since the floodgates were left open and people were allowed to have any mod they wanted if they could write it in lua and if it stayed within certain parameters set by Blizzard.
Unlike FF14, the mechanics in WoW are NOT clear OR inferrable what they do from a mere glance, and if you don’t believe me, how many times that god damn MFing swirly shows up in raids with just a different color swap? If it sounds like I’m tilted about it, it’s because a multi-billion dollar company has reused that freaking swirl MULTIPLE times and it often carries different mechanical meaning, rather than making assets to actually TRANSLATE what it ACTUALLY does. FF14 has had the luxury of learning from other MMOs how to show hazards, and how you should respond to them appropriately.
Most players who pick up FF14 can figure out what most of the symbols and markers mean, and more importantly, THESE REMAIN LARGELY CONSISTENT IN ALL ITERATIONS OF THE GAME. Hall of the Novice even teaches you some of these things. You see that swirly in a raid fight in WoW, it could mean something WILDLY different depending on the fight. You could take the time to read the dungeon journal, but that would spoil you on seeing and learning the fight for yourself. The fact that WoW refuses to teach mechanics through gameplay and instead rely on you having PRIOR KNOWLEDGE before tackling it is something that continues to bother me.
So players developed tools to help make mechanics clearer to interpret. WoW does not make use of telegraphed animations to dictate where you should stand to not die, nor do they use other context clues to tell you what’s coming up - not in a way that translate WHAT the mechanic will do without having a text prompt outright tell you what to do.
There’s a lot of design techniques that the developers could use to lessen the reliance on addons, whether it be through NPC dialogue in a fight or other contextual clues. Hell, take the last boss in City of Threads. You have her drop orbs on the ground that damage anyone who touches them, but what’s this??? They move! And what denotes where they’ll end up? A god damn purple swirly (and on purple flooring?! Blizzard you shouldn’t have. Really, you shouldn’t have. Send whomever made that back to art school to learn some god damn color theory FFS. IDIOT decision - I will never not be mad about this).
Clarity would be using something like the arrow asset on the ground that you see from abilities like Mistcaller to show you exactly WHERE the danger zone is instead of it being a vague mix of chaos in an already chaotic fight. But they don’t. Why? Hell if I know. These people barely do thorough tests of their games anymore with how buggy TWW has been, and it shows.
It’s clunk. It’s entirely because of the clunk. The fact that there’s so much clunk and clutter to deal with in this ancient as hell game has created a space where people benefit from addons addressing an issue that the devs refuse to address properly. Factor in that addons actually make the game more accessible, and you have a formula for not really doing anything.
Mind you, I’m 100% for addons. In the right context, they’re wonderful tools to have, and they make the game more accessible. A lot of the ones I used to use for years, like bartender4 and Healbot made the game a lot easier for me to play due to IRL conditions. A lot of these features are baseline now and integrated into the game, but they weren’t always. Hell, moving your bars around is a relatively new feature to be in the base game.
I mean for god’s sake, we used to need an addon to show how close others were compared to having the boss ignore the tank and turn to slap you.
If you play without them, cool, whatever, but until you have both Ultimates AND CE achievements under your belt, kindly shut the hell up. And even if you do have them, STILL kindly shut the hell up.