Quote Originally Posted by Saraide View Post
I am very interested however how the job balance in ff11 looks like.
I haven't delved into XI endgame activities in a while. Most of my playtime with it was in 2004 and then again around 2008 with the Wings of the Goddess as the latest expansion and BLU had been in the game for about 2 years when I got back into it. Was it a powerful job? Yes. Did everyone and their grandmother run it for all content? No. When I played heavily, FFXI wasn't structured like XIV was and was more like, Runescape, if I had to make an off-hand comparison. More grindy, more punishing, more time consuming, more teamwork required for basic progress.

As for recently, last time I touched FFXI with any seriousness was late 2022/early 2023 where BLU wasn't used in big fights at all. There's absolutely a. . .raid structure similar to extreme and savage raids of XIV. Zone into a place, fight a thing (or several things), win, leave and get currency rewards. BLU was mostly serving as a power-leveling job, to powerful level other peoples job to 99 and farm JP. Didn't see it much outside of that. BLU was also, supposedly, the best subjob for PLD and with the correct gear, JP, skills and spells PLD/BLU - iirc - was the best tank at the time. But it was also like, marginally the best tank and for the effort and time it required, was rarely deemed worth the investment.

Mind you, this is also a game where support jobs walk into a fight, stand off in narnia, lay down their buffs and just stand around doing nothing. The life of a Geomancer in XI. Always in demand but not exactly stellar gameplay.