All the Gearsyncing is getting out of Hand, at least for me.

[Packetdancer]

As a raider myself, I prefer syncing because I'd rather have enjoyable content and not facerolls. One of the main reasons I despise getting LoTA and Syrcus Tower in Alliance is because they're both so pathetically easy due to how OP we are, they're boring. The whole enjoyment of fights in FFXIV is learning mechanics, which gets downright ignored without a sync. In fact, even back as a new player, I was disappointed upon queuing into Thordan Normal for the first time. He was so embarrassingly weak, I stood in everything. Here's the climax of Heavensward and I'm laughing at it. That took away some of the story's tension and enjoyment for me.

This. So much this.

I know so many sprouts who have this buildup going into Cape Westwind, and Castrum Meridianum, and Praetorium, where it's going to be this Big Fight for the fate of Eorzea... and then people just absolutely steamroller through and no one worries about mechanics in the least. And it's a huge disappointment. Heavensward has amazing story, but Thordan as a fight is anticlimactic. Some of that is just gear powercreep when you have high-level folks queuing in via roulette, since even as it is high-level gear tends to sync down extremely OP. Some of it is things not being rebalanced for new kit after several expansions.

Take the Crystal Tower storyline: it feels like it should be a struggle since you're fighting basically what was the very heart of Allagan power in its last days, and then stepping into the Void itself to take on a powerful Voidsent. But LotA and Syrcus, people just ignore mechanics that aren't an instant-wipe; WoD has some you have to do, but people so outgear it now that you can basically have half the group asleep or AFK and still clear. (Which is arguably beneficial in one sense, as many people will be half-asleep after their eleventy-six-thousandth run of Labyrinth.)

And that that's with syncing down. Without ilevel sync, it feels like only forced animations/phase transitions would keep anything in there alive more than 20 seconds at most.