As the title is it absolutely necessary to use a dosing pump in order to grow corals? Whilst i appreciate this maybe more effective in getting strong growth, can you manually add the relevant nutrients either by an all in one liquid or each element at a time, Cal,Mg, etc

As above you definitely can, but IMO for stony corals it's better to use a doser because you can split the dose into smaller bits and do it all through the day.  Mine doses 1ml of alk 24 times a day for example.  Otherwise you can get quite big swings, before mine went tits up, it was going from 8 dkh down to 6.8 during a day for example.  Quite a big jump to dose it back to 8 again in one go.




Also I'm too lazy