Think I'm going to give FFXI a spin for a bit.

[Bigfish]

Go all melee or go all nukers. Mixed groups do all right, but once you start getting into the 50's and 60's, the best stuff to kill for xp is either insanely magic immune or has huge AoE that wrecks melee. Start out with your PLD as /WAR. You don't get a lot out of /NIN until 74 where you turn from a tank to a DPS role in the party (since everyone turns DPS at end game). Either take a SCH or a RDM, dont' take both. You really wont need the healing once you get rolling. SAM/WAR = GODLY. I will warn you about BLU's, they take a lot of work to learn your blue mage spells. If they are played right, they do pretty well but the heavy hitters (war, sam, drg) will still win in a dps race. Their are a couple rough patches while leveling, but once you hit the 55-57 region, hit the xpack areas and your paladin will be casting more heals than your healer does. You'll spend the majority of the time casting haste and refresh and watching things die in <10 seconds. If you go 4 Sam's, 1 healer and a Pld tank, things will die so insanely fast it won't even be funny. You'll just spam your WS button and they will be going off constantly the way they get TP.

Well, my intent wasn't to set up the most optimal party that rakes in XP as fast as possible. I'm more interested in seeing what I can do with very long, perfectly timed skill chains and magic bursts. That and see how far I can get in the missions. I may end up switching the party make up around. I already decided to change the SCH/WHM to a WHM/SCH.

The basic idea is to have the PLD/NIN tank, the WHM and RDM Melee on top of casting, while the BLU and SAM do their thing. BLM Bursts where appropriate. At this point I'm still in the conceptual phase, but my idea is to just have fun with the set up and bask in being able to enjoy RDM and WHM melee. Well, that and experiment with the class's functionality, which is to say I've always thought RDM and WHM got side lined to pocket healer a bit more than I would have liked to have seen.