Your talking about level 60 and pop, so like 3-4 expansions in. Rangers werent soloing shit in vanilla eq. I could be mistaken but im pretty sure there were huge level gaps where there were no animals to kill for exp. Surefall glades, karanas, then like nothing.
In early eq the solo classes were necromancers, druid/wiz(quad kiting), and mages. Shamans could root rot to solo but were welcome/needed in groups. Warriors, monks, rogues, paladins, shadow knights, clerics, rangers, enchanters, bards were forced to group. P99 isnt real vanilla, everything else is rose colored glasses, eq was 100% a forced grouping game for the majority of its players.
Bards could do some zone wide kiting but it wasnt until they fixed instruments that it was effective at all. I remember in rathe mtns a bard would be running around with half the zone chasing him. It took an hour to kill the shit for a chunk of exp, but 1 slip up and the bard died. Literally the only /ooc in rathe was monks yelling at bards for training them (monks had some quest guy there later i think, but there was a rez staff early on that was $$) and bards asking for a rez. Later in kunark they gave instruments stats or fixed it so the stats did something, i can't remember, but it allowed bards to kite zones and kill shit in 20 minutes instead of an hour and thats when you started seeing bards solo.
I dont remember if it was kunark or later when they added light blues (formerly green mobs) that would give exp but i remember clerics being happy as pigs in shit because they could finally solo something and gain exp, vs very specific undead light blue mobs.
Kunark changed a lot of things that enabled more classes a chance to solo, like animal mobs across level ranges, changes to charm mechanics so enchanters could even use that spell, etc but it still only got to maybe 50/50 classes that could/could not solo