Most Unusual Party Setups?

what are the most unusual but effective party setups that you've used befor? what are the necessary conditions to make it work?

Meh there's nothing unusual, only suboptimal.

I've done 5whm/nin + brd a dozen years ago.

The only way you're going to get something "unusual" is like everyone used cataclysm cause we were bored. or we all subbed ranger and used troll guns with bronze bullets.

Back in the day: 6 BSTs or 5 BSTs + 1 WHM in BC40 (or same PT setup during XP in Cape Terrigan from ~65-72).

war, drk, mnk, nin, smn, brd.
Lv. 50s~ collibri camp with smn solo healing and bard pulling.
I rode that healing ruby recast and spammed the hell out of cure2 while the DD would constantly re-apply shadows.
someone would die around once every 15 minutes, because I ran out of mp.

Yuhtunga mandies & goblins. Levels in the late 20's range. Had 7 people in the party. No real good party buffs were missed by the person outside of party and exp wasn't killed. It went okay. Not terribad.

6 pld merit party on weapons in sky. Sub nin and dual wielding justice sword and joyeuse. Still one of the best memories I have of the game. Was tons of fun.

sub job system would lay the ground work for lots of versatility but SE ruined it with their massive *** for tank, heal and most importantly support jobs. gimping supports when subbed doesn't help the situation either.
the 3 least liked job roles are the most important once. tanks were the only exception on the popularity scale back when NIN tanking was a thing and now with RUN, both times only cause they could also DD. shows how much out of touch SE is with the player base. one would think they finally got the message with COR (support/DD) and RUN (Tank/DD) and i think they even tried with GEO (support/magic DD) but failed miserably.

i think there are exotic setups (or how those setups could be played) but you'd need a group of friends to make it work. shout parties get suspecious quick when you deviate a bit from the norm and most of the time they aren't prepared for it either (for example didn't unlock all WS or BLU's who only farmed the standard DD spells...). ppl also avoid anything that requires coordination as long as there is a alternative, even if it requires massive overgearing and 1hours.

I actually wish they enhanced the support job feature so instead of picking one job at half level and it's abilities, you could choose 3-5 random abilities/job traits from any job to create customized support features for your main without being locked into the half leveled sub. Things like dual wield shouldn't come with a job restriction to use it.

CPed quite a few of my DRG JPs as main healer, drg/rdm just casting barfire to activate breath, along the same lines back in 75cap days lvling pup in Caedarva mire mainhealing as pup/whm for doing -na spells and deploying when healing was needed.

It was unusual for the time (2005-6ish), SMn burn pt in korrokala tunnel on worms or having someone as lvl 75 pull the zone and use astrael flow.