casters: what am I missing

[Happosai]

Don’t listen to ANY of these comments. The only true way to find out is level and play them both. Based off of that then make a decision. I am a caster… Not a blm not a smn but a caster. Do both.

Great advice that all should listen to. My summoner is lvl 52 ish and so far I hate it lol I'm sure if I practiced it more it would become second nature but the amount of buttons is a bit much for me personally. I could probably handle it if i could get away with having the pet on sic but... no. I do kind of feel like im being pideon holed into smn as all recruiting statics i see are looking for smn, not smn/blm and certainly not just blm. But oh well im gonna stick with what i enjoy. If that means i have to wait till i outgear content to be allowed to "try" so be it. But yes, overall people should try for themselves. Dots n pets n aether choices are not my thing.

[Lavieh]

Gotta respectfully disagree about a low skill ceiling on SMN, or that BLM's skill ceiling is much higher.

SMN's floor would be 1-2-3 Dots, 3x Festers, DWT -> Deathflare. It is pretty simple and the numbers produced from following such a simple pattern are really pretty decent. There is definitely a lot of things you can do to optimize your SMN rotation such as proper AT stack management, not clipping dots, attacking, using the right pet ect. But reaching the base potential of SMN is stupidly easy and optimizing your decisions doesn't really make a huge difference as opposed to other classes. That is what I meant by low ceiling. Yes there is a lot of tweaking you can do to increase your DPS but the end result isn't far off from that of a decent SMN.

I may also be off with the skill ceiling of BLM. I think that the ceiling comes into to play when you have to handle mechanics though and learning how to DPS through them.

SMN is about what you can do to the enemies, BLM is about what the enemies do to you.

This is easily the biggest thing that distinguishes the two classes. You can always control what you do to an enemy but it is hard to control what the enemy can do to you (though possible). I would argue that SMN is among the easiest of classes to play decently (Given no personal preference, like not being good at watching dot timers ect).

[Uninstall]

SMN's floor would be 1-2-3 Dots, 3x Festers, DWT -> Deathflare. It is pretty simple and the numbers produced from following such a simple pattern are really pretty decent. There is definitely a lot of things you can do to optimize your SMN rotation such as proper AT stack management, not clipping dots, attacking, using the right pet ect. But reaching the base potential of SMN is stupidly easy and optimizing your decisions doesn't really make a huge difference as opposed to other classes. That is what I meant by low ceiling. Yes there is a lot of tweaking you can do to increase your DPS but the end result isn't far off from that of a decent SMN.

What you talked about is the skill floor not the skill ceiling though.

[Inosaska]

SMN is easy even if played badly still produces better results then someone who plays badly at blm and that's basically it. I've been playing SMN from the beginning but I don't think I'm anywhere near good with it. I play it because of how easy it is to get into the job. The one thing to work on is stack management but I really suck at controlling my pet in fact I don't even bother but I still do good but maybe that's just me thinking I'm good but I'm bad.

The job is still a warlock from wow and I never once controlled my pet in that game and still produced high dps being top 3 maybe because I focus on keeping my dots up correctly makes me look good and casting my spells constantly. Do those two things and you do perfectly fine dps in the end.

I stopped playing the job recently though and I'm in limbo about playing the game because all these new buttons are such a turn off for me. I could go back to leveling my drk which was easy and didn't require much to play. That's always an option for me. I just don't know. I also suck at ability weaving. I guess I'm just turned off by the game with all the changes or maybe I'm just stressing out to much at trying to produce good DPS. Sorry if I fell off topic just needed to get that out of me. Any advice would be great though.

[Lavieh]

What you talked about is the skill floor not the skill ceiling though.

I was talking about how little a difference reaching the ceiling makes compared to the floor.