Quote Originally Posted by Grimwald View Post
What about RDM, BLM, NIN, SAM and PLD? They prepared you pretty well for your job. PLD was about knowing your cooldowns and maximizing your total amount of effective hit points, RDM was about knowing the cooldowns, effects and implications of your job, BLM was about learning how to carefully weave spells in order to not get your shit wrecked, and SAM was about getting as much damage out of your weapon skills via skillchains (which were used constantly on mobs like Kirin/Byakko/etc).

All that stuff is relevant to endgame, learning the tools of your class makes you a better player, being a better player who knows how to play their job makes you better at endgame by default.
RDM: RDMs are healers in XI. You don't learn to heal through the maat fight, you learn how to nuke and sleep. Something you shouldn't be doing.

BLM: You spam nukes and sleep. If you do that in any end game content you'll die.

NIN and PLD: The only thing that slightly resembles end game content, but you still don't learn to maintain hate.

SAM: You spam Weapon skills. If you do that in end game content you'll end up dead. It teaches you how to zerg badly.

Quote Originally Posted by Grimwald View Post
You never used food? There's no excuse why you wouldn't, it makes shit go faster. As a PLD tank if I didn't constantly have max HP food on I'd be wasting my LS' time with needless deaths.

Soloing has nothing to do with this albeit I solo'd plenty of Sky pops as RDM, guess you can do some endgame content solo. (I also ended up selling those drops for a mil a pop).
If you needed a Maat fight to teach you how to use food, I've got some bad news for you. You should have used food plenty of times before the Maat fight too, unless you were terrible.

Soloing has everything to do with this. 75% of the jobs are based around party situations and Maat is a solo fight, with no subjob. The Maat fight doesn't resemble anything at 75 or 99 endgame.