Turn down sound and graphics? Other pro tips?

[Tordan]

Greetings all.
Is there any downside to turning down the sound volume and lowering the graphics settings?
The reason I´m asking is that last evening I logged on to TeamSpeak för the first time and couldn´t hear the voices due to all the banging, explosions and other sound effects. As far as I know there are few, if any, sounds that are important for attention grabbing, mainly Omens sounds but they are to warn of gaining threat, not loosing threat which is more important to me.

On a similar note I usually turn down the graphics to a minimum to avoid lag and the feeling of standing inside a fireworks display which prevents me from seeing what´s going on around me. I only turn up the slider which enables the Concecration graphic on the floor, just to see if any baddies are outside of it.

Are there other handy tips for increasing situational awareness?

[hoho]

As you said majority of the important sounds are made by bossmods and they are usually quite well heard even at low volume. I generally have the wow sounds turned down really low and boosted vent a bit so I can hear people talk but still also the stuff coming from bossmods.

[Marblehead]

I like listening to music while raiding, cause it calms me in a way so I can focus on the game and ignore all the "noobiness" that goes around by my less focused guildmates. Actually, to do my job, I don't need to hear all the dialogs that bosses say and the spells that being cast. They are just extra noise. However, there are 2 things that I want to hear while raiding, bossmod warnings and ventrilo. Ventrilo has to be the loudest sound, cause we don't want to make our raid leader mad by missing his orders, with bossmods sounds being a bit lower but still louder than anything else cause we don't want to mess things up.

Graphics are not so important as long as you can see your own consecrate (cause if you can see that then you can see all the important boss abilities you need to avoid) and you have more than 10 fps.

The most important thing for raid awareness is addons. I'll recommend you 4 addons that, in my opinion, are a must-have for tanks (and raiders generally).

1) DXE Bossmods: Which bossmods you will use it's more of a personal taste thing, as long as you can hear the warnings and see the timers at the right time. Personally, I find DXE to be better and more to my liking than DBM or BigWigs.

2) Execution: Learn it. Love it. It's your combat log eyes. It can warn you (and anyone else you like) for anything you want it to. Taunt misses, vindication drops, bubble wall fades and many many many more. Your imagination is the limit here.

3) Grid with GridStatusRaidDebuff: You need to see when your co-tank has 9 debuffs on Festergut to taunt or who got hit by Malleable Goo to curse at him? Then watch Grid. No need for target switches or big unitframes.

4) Tidy Plates with Threat Plates: This is the best way to see on which mobs you have aggro. This is a nameplate addon that depending your threat level on a target, it changes its nameplate. When losing aggro from a mob it immediately catches your attention and combining it with Grid's threat option you know exactly who got aggro.


I left for last the ultimate tip for raid awareness:
DON'T have any kind of female presence in a 100 yard radius while raiding (even if it is you mother, your girlfriend or your cat)!

[Boyfriend]

I found it more helpful than I thought to show debuffs on target of target (5 or so is enough) for tanks this covers most instances of having to see when you have to taunt, and allows for a more central location than raidframes.

Tuning your bossmods to only show the bars and play sounds on the stuff you care about. Most of the time I don't need to know stuff that only affects dpsers or healers and it cuts down on the spam on some bosses.

[blakk]

I use a small focus frame to watch for tank swaps. It shows five buffs and five debuffs.

[econ21]

Graphics are not so important as long as you can see your own consecrate (cause if you can see that then you can see all the important boss abilities you need to avoid) and you have more than 10 fps.

Just out of interest, what setting affects this? My computer is graphically challenged, so I try to lower settings but would like consecration and related abilities to be visible. I can see my consecration when it casts (flames spread out), but thereafter it is not visible (while it is ticking, I can't see any evidence that it is still up). Is this normal or is it a problem? I remember with some BC bosses, I had trouble seeing important boss abilities and had to tweak my graphics to show them but I have since re-installed and have forgotten what exactly I changed.

[KysenMurrin]

Since around 3.1 or 3.2 that's been controlled by the "projected textures" checkbox.

[inthedrops]

I would caution against the assumption that boss mods are the only important sounds to hear. There are a LOT of sounds going on around you from other players, and even yourself that aid in making ones awareness what it needs to be for top end raiding. For example, it's obvious when your hammer misses because no BONG sound is made. You know for sure that you changed your seal because you can hear the sound. You can hear other putting up buffs, shields, you can hear when melee is parrying the crap out of a boss (which might need you need to adjust your position a bit), etc. Sure, visuals can cover a lot of that too but sometimes you can't look at the entire playfield while managing everything else you need to worry about.

Here's a suggestion and it's what I do:

1. All game sound goes through my computer speakers. I control the volume with an easy to reach knob on the speakers themselves.
2. All vent audio goes through my headset. I can control the volume there separately as well.

I think this is a much more efficient thing to do than playing all sound through my headset.

Vent sound is WAYY higher than game sound relatively speaking. I prioritize vent commands and communication over game sounds but I can usually hear them all at the same time. Just make sure you don't have a terrible mic that picks up everything going on in your room.

Oh, also learn how to adjust people's volume with vent (or how to normalize volume). This way that you don't have to turn your sound up to 11 to hear that guy that "always whispers" while the guy that "always yells" is blowing out your ear drums.

[Mozen]

DXE is quite spammy. It's got all sorts of weird sounds that's just irritating. For example the default settings spam you whenever anyone's got Legion Flames. But that's not necessary. I only need a warning when I get the flames, or when I'm standing in one. BigWigs served me very well in Ulduar staying out of the way, and only popping up to tell me that I'm standing in Devouring Flame.

Similarly, when Icehowl does his cone breath, I don't need to hear that twitchy warning sound that he's doing the breath. There's no way to avoid it. Icehowl is a big guy. I can see he's doing the breath. I actually got spammed so much that I started to ignore DXE sounds, and in one run actually ignored my own Legion Flame and died.

Then I just turned it off.

At the moment the only value I find in boss mods is the phase/cooldown timers, which can often be off a little. And even if boss mods are silent, Blizzard has put in enough built-in warnings in the encouters to keep us awake. I find a scrolling combat text add-on like MSBT is great in extracting boss emotes and such and popping them up in the center of the screen (or was that Blizzard built-in? I'm not sure). Relying too much on boss mods will lower your environmental awareness.

As for graphics, I also have it all the way down to just one notch up from the minimum level showing Consecration. The minimum level actually shows a smaller Consecration, I think. But that was 3.2 when I last checked. Also, back then the Obsidian Sanctum tidal waves were somehow not showing properly. It would only show up at its initial position, then come over invisible (pushing lots of people away as they can't see it) and then appear again at the other side of the island. I'm not sure if maybe that's got to do with having low particle effects.

Just always have projection texture ticked. Without that you won't see things like Hodir's Icicle runes.