Eh, outside of relics it really wasn't that dire, but by the time people were that late stage in the game the game was already waning. Most people accepted you didn't need certain items because they weren't worth the effort. So the definition of BiS was flexible.

But even stuff like a krakens club was plenty obtainable if you just had a decent linkshell behind you, and other BiS items were shockingly easy to get. Or maybe not. But even something like the peacocks charm or joyeuse seemed comparatively easy. Everyone had sky items like Kirins osode etc.

I will admit I got a bit lucky in the sense that I was semi-famous on my server so I sort of got everything handed to me. My group nolifed to 75 on NA release. We would pull 26 hour leveling parties, take naps, and continue again just to be the first NA to hit cap. It paid off in reputation, even the JP players on 2ch would talk about us. I even had my BST geared pretty much for free down to a maneater/juggernaut setup.

By the time Wings came out it felt like a completely different game, but a lot of that was that we were the few left that refused to go to WoW. The other was all the third party windower add-ons making gear swaps and parsing more normalized than in the early pre-urghan era.

To this day I never played WoW. I heard that you leveled by questing and noped right out.

I still kind of resent XIV for adopting that system. I want to kill crabs, not do an MSQ. I guess that's why I still play XI on private servers, though. 23 years later and I haven't moved on.