So, After 4 Days with Tech Support GM Via Ticket, they decided it was a game bug and I needed to post it here.
GIF of the Issue courtesy of guildmate:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/428385297215127554/558108498404048946/wow.gif
Long story short, for some reason, it seems that in 8.1.5, “Screen Flash/Overlay” effects when you stand in something bad that causes the edges of your screen to flash seem to have been pushed back in priority when it comes to loading. Everything else HAS to load before them. And as such, when you step in the bad, the game has nothing to load, so it instead loads a black screen. (I’m not sure why it doesn’t just leave your screen as it is though, that’d be better :/)
As a guildie in the Tech Support forum thread posted in his theory (as well as a few guildies in our discord), it seems like the game is now preferring to load every other game texture, effect, etc, even the higher resolution textures before them, even if you don’t have those enabled. (He said in discord that he plays with a setting of “1” in raid, but he saw the zone around him slowly go from low res to high res before the black screens went away)
Now, if you target a boss and wait 5ish minutes for everything around it to load, the effects will load fine. However, not everyone has that luxury. On top of that, for world bosses such as Ivus in Darkshore, if you join a group via the Group Finder that phases you, your graphics cache gets cleared and that 5ish minutes resets.
I’ve personally talked to over 100 people now who have experienced this. I don’t know what causes some people to and others not to, but I’d guess it’s indeed a matter of most people waiting a few minutes to engage a boss (for instance, most of the bosses with these effects you tend to have time to target before engaging, as they’re like Grong, Stormwall Blockade’s elemental, Jaina.) And for Ivus, most people probably just assume it’s that one boss and don’t consider it worth reporting.
But as you can see in my tech thread, I’m on the lower end of supported systems, but my guild mate is well above the recommended systems.
Link to Original Tech Support Thread When I thought it was: Black Screen when standing in certain things?