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Its rare, but certainly not completely wasted.
The question becomes "what am I giving up in order to build an elemental resistance build?"
Often endgame tanks will do elemental resistance builds against grand wyrms (Tiamat and the like) with some success. Since their attacks are so primarily magical and attuned to one element, giving up VIT, def, Haste, etc isn't as much of a loss. I bold that because at some point you do start giving up too much, and that's when a resistance build can really hurt you.
To be honest, I've never seen any general benefit to it. Strong barspells (either from a high enhancing skill RDM/WHM, or a merited WHM) are going to give you a great deal more than most easily obtainable setups. There are specific situations where its good, but in 99% of cases, its just not worth the tradeoffs.
Just to touch up on this so there isn't confusion...
When Tiamat is flying in the air, his fire breath attacks totally ignore shadows, and will deal about 260-270 a pop with shellra V. He also shoots them pretty fast.
There is a huge HUGE benefit to resistance set ups, though its more so for tanks than other jobs.
First, the barspell from a full merited whm, with af2 legs, still isn't going to help you resist anything. There are certain 'tiers' of resistance that you need to break, if you can't break this resistance then you will notice all of your gear doing almost nothing for you.
When Tiamat is flying in the air, bard carol with crumhorn, and whm barspell is NOT enough, not even close. You need to get into the 270-290 total range to start resisting its attacks. With say about 130-150 in gear, which I understand is not the easiest to obtain, those 260-270 fire shots get reduced to 30 almost full time. To show that there is a tier, at around 240-250ish fire resistance, you rarely resist any attack and take the full 260-270ish damage.
So, atleast as far as endgame NMs are concerned, the whm barspells and bard carols are not enough.
Finally, you don't keep this equipment equipped full time, that's also crazy lol. You have macros built up so that you can switch inbetween the gear, and use it when its most necessary.
An example is on Cerberus he has a deadly move called Gates of Hades. Through out the entire fight your tank can wear his regular gear, then below 25% Cerberus starts to use this new, very deadly move. It can be stunned, however sometimes your stunners may miss. A simple macro swap while he is preparing the move will be huge. Instead of taking 800+ damage and a nasty 20 hp burn effect, you take about 100 damage and resist the burn effect. After the move is over, macro switch your regular gear back in. You gain the benefit of your haste/enmity/hp built equip, and the benefit of your resistance equip.