While it’s true that the dev team will keep addons and their capabilities in mind when designing their raid encounters, they are not necessarily “tuned” for DBM usage.
As was mentioned earlier in this thread, LFR up to HC is doable without DBM (HC might take a bit more work ofc). In general it will take a few runs with a few wipes to “have seen it all” (which is true even with DBM), but then a watchful player will have noticed the tells that Blizzard implements these days (starting with voice lines, void zones, cast bars, etc.) in addition to actual bossmod-like announcements (the ones you have to manually disable in DBM to avoid double announcements).
I also agree that WeakAuras or buff/aura awareness has become a much bigger factor, especially with the default UI having laughably small unit frames and auras on contemporary screen resolutions (yes, you can increase UI scale, but they’re still much too small especially compared to ElvUI or most custom unit frames people use).
As such I do believe that the “necessity” of addons is more of a crutch that allows Blizzard to postpone (possibly to “never”) to update their UI to make the information (already available in the game) easier to parse or see.
Now as for Mythic, it’s a difficulty level that was created specifically to require split second decision making without any room for error. Here I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard goes “they’ll have an add-on for that”, because that’s precisely what the target audience of that difficulty will do and as such crank up the values to “are you mental?!”.
Finally, even with all the built-in tells and DBM, I witness far too many wipes even in LFR. Even after explaining people the actual mechanics. After 15 years, some people still don’t understand Blizzard’s default boss mechanic toolset: Don’t stand in void zones, the “scrum and soak” debuff, the “drop it at the margins” debuff, the “don’t tank them close to each other” bosses, the “all inside this zone or we’re all dead” bubbles, etc.
Yet somehow, even with DBM existing people fail to heed its warnings, prompts and alerts. You ask them “didn’t you see that honking big alert at the center of your screen, with the borders flashing red, that we all need to run into the bubble?”. The answer you get: “Must have missed it, there was so much going on” (and I had this happening not just in LFR).
And this is where it might get interesting: Maybe we are at a point where the encounters themselves throw so much animation, alerts, and voice lines at you, that using DBM just adds a confusing cacophony of “stuff” that fills up your screen… and doesn’t change the outcome at all.
PS: I raid without DBM because I don’t feel it’s necessary once you have seen bosses 1-2 times and you’re not into progress raiding.
