I tend to feel your pain when it comes to the learning curve.

There's a few things that would help (I believe).

1) Less limited gear pre-51. It's not really that you need to go get new wristwear when you die that's a problem, it's that there's no up to date list anywhere of what gear exists where and that problem is exacerbated by having to check 5 places because item limits are capped.

2) An item search (admin provided) for items not inside area explores. This shouldn't be hard to do and would dramatically lower the learning curve.

3) Lowered 'gear gap' pre-51. I'm actually in preference to a lowered gear gap *all around*. I'd like to see high end gear be 10-15% better than unlimited gear, instead of the current 400-500% better in most cases. It'd be nice to not totally get roflstomped with an unlimited vendored gear set.

4) Less farming. I think that warriors for instance should get a detect invis skill that just has a cooldown longer than it's activation timer. Rather than farming detect invis potions or farming gold to buy detect invis potions, you could have it up say, 33% of the time without farming at all.

Anyway, those are my suggestions.