I’m posting this here in hopes that a blue sees this, because a lot of other people have already sent in feedback tickets and forum posts within the last year to no avail. This really is one of the most immersion-breaking changes I’ve ever seen implemented in WoW.
Ever since Dragonflight launched, Blizzard reduced the sound effects coming from other party members in instanced content by 95%. This doesn’t apply to outdoor world content such as world boss groups, but only instanced content such as dungeons, raids, arenas, and battlegrounds.
If you’re standing near 40 other players and you’re all attacking a boss, all of the other player’s spells are virtually dead silent. It’s extremely immersion-breaking. To test it for yourself, join a random raid or dungeon, crank your volume up, and when you’re in combat stand next to your party members and make sure your own character isn’t attacking anything.
It doesn’t matter if you’re standing next to 30 people, you literally can only hear the faintest whisper of other people’s spells, even if your volume is turned up loud enough to shatter your neighbor’s windows.
A year or so ago Blizzard stated that this was an intended change to make our own individual sound effects noticeable compared to other player’s, but whatever they used to scale down other sound effects went drastically too far. I’ve seen plenty of other posts on the forums about it, and nearly everybody hates this change.
It’s extremely jarring to be inside of an epic raid and ONLY hear your own character’s spells.
Blizzard, please give us a slider option to toggle how loud we want our party member’s spells to be. I understand why you’d want us to be able to hear ourselves better, but this is absolutely ridiculous and the “epic” feel of the game has unnecessarily suffered for people who like the immersion of sound.
I hope something is eventually done about this.