casters: what am I missing

[Sleigh]

Right now SMN has a pretty low skill floor as a well as a low Skill ceiling.

While BLM has a really high Skill ceiling.

Yea if Dot and Pet management aren't your thing then SMN will be a pest but given all things equal SMN is far easier to deal good numbers on than a BLM. Furthermore, it is a lot harder to distinguish a great SMN while a great BLM shines really bright.

Gotta respectfully disagree about a low skill ceiling on SMN, or that BLM's skill ceiling is much higher. SMN is more formulaic, but there's plenty to min/max on it, whether that's deciding on the optimal way to spend your Aetherflow stacks per the DPS check, to keeping your pet in line, to adjusting your rotation if you have to spend your DWT sooner than the minute marks that are so easy on a dummy.

Honestly BLM isn't that hard. Extremely easy on a dummy IMO (even if most people can't seem to pull it off right). The skill floor is absolutely devastating on BLM, this is true, but once you have the basics of it down, you kind of just do that dummy rotation (keeping an eye on proc and timer allowances) and when crap happens to you, you have to adjust once or twice then go on your way until the next variance comes at you. Honestly not a large skill barrier even in savage on that, it's just damage control.

Basically, SMN is about what you can do to the enemies, BLM is about what the enemies do to you. I would be very hesitant to say SMN is as easy mode as you suggest, even though I admit in some fights SMN has a much less confusing and adaptive time than BLM will, which is about the extent of the difficulty gap on them. To this day I see streams of A3S where players have BRDs and they'll do less than me up until add phase, which is extremely strange to me but I can't believe the skill ceiling is so low if I'm outperforming players in vastly better circumstances. People for some reason said the same thing about BRD in ARR, low skill ceiling, but then you'd see some BRDs top the charts in fights they had no business doing melee level DPS.