I think this is a new bug introduced after the Blood and Madness patch.
After a couple fights, Sound Effects, UI, etc. get suddenly quieter, about to half its usual volume. Volume sliders in options menu stay where they are, just the actual sound output becomes way too soft. Changing sound quality fixes this issue temporarily, but it resumes to its library mode very soon after(it doesn’t even last one fight ).
I also feel like the game goes completely silent a bit more frequently. It usually happened when I was in a big fight, like in WvW or world bosses, but it feels like it’s happening in more places now.
This has been happening to me lately as well, but today the volume drop was just immediately after I logged in. Restarting doesn’t seem to fix it anymore…
Another interesting point about this is that the issue doesn’t seem to affect character and monster voices. Consequently, fights sound like a lot of people and monsters shouting and screaming each other to death.
I’m getting a variation of this as well (seems to be all sounds, not just some). It started a few weeks ago, but seems to be getting worse. Right now my PC sound volume is set well above where I normally use it; the in-game sliders (and in particular the master volume control) are in the same position I always set them (and I’ve tried resetting everything to default, as well, just to make sure I haven’t got anything messed up unintentionally); yet the whole game sound is down to nothing much more than a whisper. Very frustrating (not to say potentially dangerously unhealthy, when you have everything turned up to allow for it, and then the next time you start the game, everything blasts on at full volume). I’m running on NVIDIA and Realtek sound drivers (ASUS P8P67 motherboard)
Restarting the game doesn’t make any difference for me. Rebooting the computer resolves it until next time.
They changed something with the audio mixing with the Halloween patch. After answering a few questions from a dev/mod, we haven’t heard much back in the way of solutions.
).