No level, no gear, no nothing I was a 99 feoh with +3 Seraph set and +4 Blessed Apo Retributer 2 SA! Which was pretty fine at the time, but not for my level the thing is that back then you couldn't do much alone. You needed friends and constant parties to even try to enter instances. And you did them in every damned cooldown, to get drops as 1 EWR in top instances... people only did open field farm for the quests, because the XP was null from grinding until a certain point...
So now new players get 105 fairly easy, exalted gear, and so on. And it's still the same as back then: you still don't have adena. People now speak about 1bi like it is pocket change. 100m was really hard to get let alone 1 damned billion you have to prioritize what you need to get next and you probably can't play alone forever if you wanna progress further in this game.