New Sword shown..

[Nalien]

At their peak Relics in XI required a few difficult fights and even DD (DPS) checks for certain NM fights, e.g the Ram, Yin/Yang (and by extension, Dynamis Lord) and your respective Animated Weapon/Shield fight.

I don't really remember them being any more difficult than S Ranks. It was just a case of "We're doing Dynamis - Beaucedine tonight and I'm throwing you all under the truck to get my Attestation". Yin/Yang was probably the only thing with any real mechanics (had to kill them around the same time, no?), and that's a bleedin' Guildhest in this game, with 5 mobs instead of 2, though I guess they don't hit like a truck.

Much of the "difficulty" I remember in Dynamis was killing things in an order, with the actual "bosses" being trivial if you gave yourself plenty of time after currency farming. I guess if I count idiots in Dynamis - Windurst (for example) as difficulty then that would make Dynamis harder, and I guess I should since idiots are the only reason Titan was ever hard... Still, fights with groups in XI were just a matter of auto-attacking and hitting a macro when you got TP, or /healing when you ran out of MP (oh god I'd forgotten about that until now...), really cannot find it in myself to call it harder when I specifically remember doing Dynamises at 2am, dozing off several times, and still clearing it. I simply cannot do that in XIV...

Welcome to FFXIV's end-game structure - It's easy to try to downplay FFXI when XIV isn't any better.

Main difference being, XIV only does it with Coil (and that's something they even want to rectify). Loot lockouts in Crystal Tower I guess, but you can still do the event. By the time ToAU came around XI had enough content for it not to matter as much, but I still remember spending a lot of time not really doing anything in the game because I couldn't (because of lockouts). Really isn't the same case with XIV.

the most you could 'solo/lowman' was Salvage, and that was if you were at the top of your game.

Are you talking about Relics/Mythics specifically, or the game in general? Because a lot of content could be lowmaned, or even soloed, other than Salvage before Abyssea came in and ruined the game. I mean, RDM/NIN was a thing.

Arch Dynamis Lord was no easy feat.

Arch Dynamis Lord was after Embrava was introduced, no? Everything was an easy feat after that.