It’s worth noting, though, that unsynced does not allow you to use the matchmaking. You’d need to be premade. And rarely will anyone be interested in running old content, especially with none of its former challenge, unless their some manner of mount reward to farm (and in which case, you need to have that fight down perfectly, or you will probably be kicked, because they’re trying to maximize clears per hour).
This. It goes from, to use a Dragoon example, a linear 1234516754-repeating to… 123. Not that the max level rotation has any thought to it whatsoever (that is reserved entirely for macrorotation — CD order/usage/sync — in XIV), but you go from a pretense of complexity to… nothing.
XIV combat has had high highs. I don’t think I’ll ever enjoy anything in WoW as much as I enjoyed late-Stormblood Monk with a ludicrous amount of Skill Speed (essentially, Haste). Its optimal play was technical down to the half-second, but it still had plenty of opportunity for situational or moment-by-moment ingenuity. It had some room for improvement (dead skills like Earth Tackle and definitely-not-great ones like Riddle of Earth, or near-dead systems like the Fists of Earth/Wind/Fire), but it was on the whole great.
But the job design has increasingly replaced actual complexity with just throwing on more cooldowns or resource system spenders (an obligatory single-target version of every formerly more identity-forming AoE), all the while making the arsenal on average less synergetic, less skill-varied, less interactive, less responsive, or outright less functional. Its thus become, on average, far more bloat, far less substance.
Context: I’ve done Savage raiding on every job in XIV at max level, just as on every class here, albeit not all at Shadowland’s max quite yet. When playing actively, I was solidly midcore. My biases are as one would accordingly expect.