Quote Originally Posted by Miles064 View Post
I'd say WoW does fights with dbm in mind and the base functions of dbm are part of the base game anyway so it isnt an issue. FF14 has it's own "dbm" with all the symbols and sounds that it uses so it doesnt really have a use for dbm so this "cactbot" does seem a bit off.

Hard agree on needing to still know how to deal with things though. Dbm has never told you how to solve everything together and mostly tells you some things on the field atm. The player still has to solve the puzzle of all the mechanics going out while still preforming well. One of the things I do like about ff fights over wow is that they tie these visuals to them. WoW also has the dungeon journal that you can open in game so I feel WoW isn't really trying to hide how things work. A lot of mechanics in FF and WoW are pretty simple after you figure how it works. WoW is just more upfront about it.
I don't think it's as clear cut as designing fights with or without addons in mind. It's a grey area and while I do think it's a consideration for higher level gameplay, especially when you consider WeakAuras also, you can play all of these fights on any difficulty without addons. There's a general community expectation to use these addons in a lot of content though, especially if you don't play in a raiding guild/team (static in FFXIV). This expectation also spreads into Mythic+ which has Raider.IO etc on top of using DBM/WeakAuras.