I suppose I’ll preeamble from where I’m coming from: I play human females almost exclusively and have spent the most time on necromancer and elementalist. In other words I swap elements a great deal and juggle conditions on myself as a matter of course. In either case I tend to fight quite “hot” in that I allow my hp to go quite low outside of bosses because I’m well aware of the fact that so long as that number isn’t 0, I’m fine.
Here is what I don’t need:
*I do NOT need to hear that “I’m still standing, barely.” I have a bloody hp gauge on my dash.
*I do NOT need to hear that “Things are getting serious.” I’ll have you know I take myself seriously at all times.
*I do NOT need to hear that I “Hope I’ll pull through.” We are not pulling through anything. This isn’t Ninja Gaiden. Things are under control.
*I do NOT need to hear that I can “move mountains” or “outrun a centaur” because that’s a lie anyway.
*I do NOT need to hear that the poison is too strong or that it’s freezing cold or anything about my leg or that I’m on fire. DEAL with it. In fact, there’s a strong probability that I’m responsible for half of those conditions and all that stuff is getting foisted on somebody else, turned into boons or eaten for hp in short order. I’m a necro, it’s FINE.
*I do NOT need to hear my character moaning and groaning in agony EVEN when my dialog audio is muted whenever crippled or crying like a babby every time she’s launched. That is still incredibly annoying. There are areas full of things like Ebonhawke Seperatists or Krait or Risen where it’s pretty much impossible not to be crippled and some bandits explicitly drop bombs on top of you in bizarre attempts to air combo. kitten happens. It’s not a big deal. I do not want to hear it.
Right now, I play the game with Dialog turned all the way down and my friends always tell me I’m missing out and quite frankly they’re right. Because I DO turn on the dialog now and again and the voice acting in general I find to be quite good. The interactions between NPCs in the environment is hilarious and adds a lot to the game and is one of its strongest points. I do think (as many seem to) that much of the voice acting has room for improvement during the story dialogue cutscenes but there’s plenty of cases where it’s strong too (I loved Zojja while sidekicking on a friend’s Asuran story for example) and in any case you aren’t hearing it every other second.
But your own voice while in the field or fighting you DO hear constantly and right now it is so irritating that I would rather miss out on all the other voices you put in the game than to hear my Necro complain one more time about the cold or the poison or her kitten leg or my Elementalist pratter about her braggably powerful elements which she’s had all of for the past thirty levels. The thing is, the majority of the lines in the game are good and the VAST majority are tolerable. It’s just a small handful – maybe 5% of the lines that ruin the entire experience and make me rather turn it ALL off. Isn’t that a shame? It’s because those 5% of voiced sounds account for like 95% of the voices you actually hear because they just keep repeating and repeating and repeating. I understand also that some people work much better with audio than visual cues – I’m a visual person and other people may not be. So don’t remove them, just give us an option. Think of it this way, I want that option because I WANT to hear the rest of your voice acting.
While you’re at it, let us optionally disable that blowing sound and the bloody hud splatter that happen when your hp gets low. I, and I’m sure many others, have developed enough game senses to grasp the situation in a fight and those cues, while useful for others, becomes irritating.