I honestly hate the spammers at this point because it is just not fun to play with them in random queues. I said it before, about 2/3rds of my exp come from the trash mobs. Only 1/3rd comes from the bosses and dungeon completion. So playing with runemage spammers is annoying because they make it very hard to get a hit in on the enemies without doing some really bad practices, like not waiting for the tank to aggro, doing a shot and then continuing to run (because otherwise the runemage will just keep going forward, etc.).
Even without that, it just doesn’t feel fun. I feel like I’m better off just pulling off my headset and reading while I wait for the party to reach the bosses and just fighting bosses since the bosses are the only things I’m going to be hitting if I wait for the tank to pull (because the enemies will be dead by then). That or just leaving because obviously they don’t need me to tank/heal anyways since they are killing everything before I can get close enough to get participation in (this issue is especially bad if I’m playing bard - to the point that I only play bard on bosses now and only if I think the boss won’t die before I can finish swapping).
You don’t really see this behavior (or issue) with runemages that do proper rotations, rangers that actually do decent damage, scoundrels that do decent damage, shamans, etc. That is why I have been trying to push for some way to push runemages away from the spam. I know from personal experience how annoying it can be and I’m not the only one, just probably the most vocal one because I want this game to be fun and attract more players.
It feels like the ones that focus on spam are often the players who are really impatient and will queue up in a dungeon as every class just to get in, teaching newer players that it is okay to do so. It is a bad practice to get into (admittedly, I have some bad practices myself, but I do try to explain that what I’m doing is not normal).
I personally am still trying to learn how to do rotations (probably Affliction and Affliction 2 are my worst combat spells right now (I can’t do resurrections or portal at all when I try to draw them properly)
Now, in unsharded dungeons (where spam is an issue), you could say that the dps isn’t a big deal.
If a mob has 100k hp and a ranger is doing 80k damage per hit once per second (just for the sake of argument), vs a runemage that is doing 80k dps as a constant stream of damage, that is a difference of 2 seconds for a kill vs 1.25 seconds for a kill. There just sometimes is not enough time to get a hit in unless you body block the mage or start the combat yourself (both are bad habits, the later is a bad habit for non-tank specifically, the first is a bad habit for any class).
The problem with spammers is less about the dps and more of that they tend to not get other players to get a hit in. So if say someone in the party needs undead for their mission (or some other dungeon mob), being unable to get a hit in is basically locking that player out of mission progress. This in turn teaches those players that they need to get a hit in no matter what, which leads to bad habits. These bad habits then start to spread to others as people start just jumping in as soon as possible for the sake of exp and/or mission progress.
(I could spam fireball for short bursts, but it starts to hurt my wrist or bones, so I don’t do that for health reasons and because I know from a personal experience how annoying it can be once the “how impressive” reaction wears off. Nothing like having to do an extra run of a dungeon to finish your mission before reset when you don’t have much time to play (With events, runemage spam is rarely an issue). (And before someone says: Just find a fellowship that can do runs with you!.. I’m already in a fellowship and I’m talking about having to party with a newbie who had a mission to finish their mission before reset and where I had to queue as any role to try to get in quickly so we had time to do a dungeon properly.)
