I don’t think there is anywhere that sound is essential in WoW, although the music is actually pretty good for atmosphere. There may be some bosses who have sound effects along with their special attacks but these days we all have raid addons to flash up big letters on screen when that happens.

I know there are some games where you can actually get the drop on another player in PvP by listening to them approach though.

I always think the AH doesn’t work or the bag didn’t open if I can’t hear the feedback sound because I forgot to turn on the speakers. I can see that the bag is open but somehow I looks wrong… hard to describe.

Maybe that’s because when I started playing computer games, they did not have sound. Only the internal speaker. Since I got the first SoundBlaster I have never turned off the sound again. For me, sound adds so much more than good graphic.

I had a Guildmate who would log into Vent but hardly ever speak. He would often claim his Mic didn’t work but a RL friend of his told me he just doesn’t like to use it. We ran together a lot and he ended up becoming my 2-man Arena partner, so he was practically forced to use his Mic, and that’s when I discovered he had a slight lisp. He was also a teenager so having a slight speech impediment on top of everything else teenagers have to go through really didn’t help with his self-esteem, but I thought he was one of the best players I ever ran with and I made sure to let him know that.

I’ve noticed over the years that WoW is one of the games I can play with the sound off and not miss it much at all. Our guild would voice-Skype during instances, but mostly gchat otherwise. I haven’t run into too many PUGs that required voice chat, though occasionally you could tell when a couple of PUGgers from the same guild were almost certainly vchatting each other.

So I guess the take home is that what you missed about the ears wasn’t the in-game sound, necessarily, but the inability to talk and be heard. Is there anywhere that in-game sounds are essential to play?