I'm not even sure what i did. I had very minor stuttering sound when I originally booted up WC3 through DOSBOX so I went into the game dos settings just to browse and not to click on anything, save changes because it's the only way to exit, exit. Bam, no more sound. I reinstalled the game, disabled cloud settings, browsed a few youtube videos setting the ideal settings in the config file, looked up mix/listmidi to which only had "Microsoft GS wavetable synth", set that into the config file, looked up the environment variable SDL_AUDIODRIVER "dsound" which didn't exist, and now I'm stuck with trying to replace my DOSBOX 0.74-2.1 with DOSbox Staging not knowing if it'll even work.

Any solutions before I lose my mind? Thanks!

Okay I fixed it. Had to launch the game normally through GOG and select 2) DOS settings and work my way to the main menu and setup music card. Under music card and digital card, it was defaulted to: NONE. Switched them back to soundblaster 16 and everything works. Then to fix the sound stuttering, I set cycles=max to cycles=fixed 70000 in dosboxWC3.conf. Absolutely crazy how no guide I've found mentions this. Not a one. I found it through pure accidence.

Working flawlessly now on Win 11.