Job Specific Traits?

[BigRed5392]

FFXI had elemental resistances and even general damage type resistances as well as an MMO which would effect party compositions depending on end game activity and even preferred exp locations for lvling up or earning merits. However it still didn't completely exclude jobs from content. .

umm so..... loldrg /kick was never a thing you saw? or lolpup? lolmnk? bst never got parties due to the exp reduction, I recall rdm who melee get kicked. I saw ppl vilified smn for not healing and doing their summons. what about blm that couldn't get pt during the colibri meripo?

ppl excluded jobs in ff11 i had first hand experience when i used to main mnk when "lolmnk" was a thing. it took me 8 hrs to get an exp party on a good day.

[RitsukoSonoda]

*snip*

That again had nothing to do with job specific traits. It had to do with either the job kit or the type of damage the job excelled at. 5x DRG + BRD merit party on colibri was popular because DRG dealt high amounts of piercing damage which most bird enemies like Colibri had horrible resistance against. RNG also did huge amounts of damage to birds with bows however DRG was favored because they could sub WHM and self sustain easily thanks to their pet. Also a majority of your examples apply to only exp/merit parties. In actual endgame nothing was completely excluded or unviable. However like FFXIV some jobs saw infrequent use either because something else just did it better or in the case of BST it was viewed as a primarily solo content job by the community and only used in rare instances where disposable pets made things easier.

As for the wait on EXP parties. That was pretty much the DF of FFXI and the DPS queue sucked as bad or worse than it did in FFXI even when people finally figured out DPS cannon parties work. However if you were a RDM or BRD you had to go /anon if you wanted to do something on that job otherwise you were spammed non stop by /tells asking if you'll join their exp/merit party.

[Gemina]

umm so..... loldrg /kick was never a thing you saw? or lolpup? lolmnk? bst never got parties due to the exp reduction, I recall rdm who melee get kicked. I saw ppl vilified smn for not healing and doing their summons. what about blm that couldn't get pt during the colibri meripo?

ppl excluded jobs in ff11 i had first hand experience when i used to main mnk when "lolmnk" was a thing. it took me 8 hrs to get an exp party on a good day.

In FFXI, I remember when leveling MNK, I used my 2-hour ability on a slime-type mob. If you recall, this ability had MNK throw an endless barrage of punches for the duration of the ability. Sounds awesome, right? Except MNKs punches were of the 'blunt' type, and slimes were resistant to that type. So despite being around level 15 and using my ultimate ability, this level 10 mob still wasted me. Now imagine the same thing in XIV, and the player who mains only a MNK, puts tons of hours in to get themselves a good spot in a raid, only to find out that the mobs are resistant to blunt damage?

This in itself shows how square has grown and learned from previous mistakes. Resistances creates constraints that limits possible job compositions, and a 2-hour ability is just dumb, dumb, so freakinggggggg DUMB! Things like this SE can fix. A skewed meta however, well that's on the community.