As a noob who would be looking to guides exactly like this to be very helpful for me. I find the content to be good, but the presentation is a little sparse.
For example, you often mention getting "rolls" on equipment. Obviously this must refer to something that is chance-based, but using the term "rolls" is very... What's the word... Its a catch 22. You'll only understand a lot of the terms fully once you have no need for the guide, so perhaps a glossary or definition as you mention meta terms would be helpful.
Also, could you maybe label a Cumulative Level or Combat Power or some kind of indication as to where somewhere would belong in a tier? I personally find even the Basic tier equipment to be difficult to get, such as the Dustin Armour. Killing a Desert Dragon or chancing r1 Blacksmithing isnt the simplest thing in the world to do, but it may be because I am likely far lower level than most (TTL: 371 with CP somewhere around 1K). Or if I happen to be exactly the demographic where the Basic tier is aimed at, you might want to make an even lower tier below that and reaffirm your demographic for the low end.
Edit: Another thing comes to mind. It might be a good idea to mention the pros and cons of particular equipment. For example, the fact that Heavy Armour gives a massive Dex hit if Heavy Armor mastery is used (also mention that without Heavy Armor mastery, the benefits of the armor are greatly reduced.) I personally find using cloth or light armour at a lower level when you have low Dex and likely a low Heavy Armour Mastery level to be more beneficial than potential pinging. Having low balance is worse than pinging imo. Dead opponents are better than opponents who fail to interrupt your tactics SOMETIMES but can still rack up the damage. Attrition is a bad thing at a low level, battles must be short to minimize the potential for error.
Keep in mind that having to explain every detail of why or why not to use a certain thing and to explain the skills associated with it is an extremely long guide, gear is a tricky subject to make a guide for without making a long essay length story about it due to the fact that it can connect to so many features in game and going into every detail is basically explaining the entire game along with it. Only reason why I haven't mentioned a lot of details that have to do with certain gears and terms is because I feel the person should have some form of knowledge on the game mechanics and how rng fits into it all, and not to mention this guide is already going to be quite long I would rather stick to the most essential things so as not to bore the reader or create unnecessary information for some people. I am also doing this basically solo with a little guidance from a few people on some of the skill sets I really havent messed with too much and don't have enough knowledge on to really make an informed recommendation so its quite a large task to do just this alone. If I could elaborate more on some of the things I would, however I am too busy with other things to do this unfortunately. This guide is already going to take a while, and I leave this thread open for people to fill in the gaps in case anyone has a question that I did not cover.
As for the tiers, its really based on personal opinion on where you fall. Basically if you can afford to move onto the next tier then you fall in that tier, however I feel gold is easy enough to come by at this point (at least in Alexina) that getting most of the things in the lower tier isnt that big of a problem, but again this is all personal opinion on the matter. If this was 3-4 years ago then ya I would definitely have to revise it because the low tier was actually basically end game LOL, however I see a lot of the items in the lower tier going for no more than 50-100k. The dustin armor can actually be gotten through a quest iirc which involves gems and those have been pouring out of events lately so it should be quite easy to get it.
It's only written that it comes from dragons, never did it say you have to hunt for them. It is a fairly common drop, I probably got at least 30 for the raids I've done. But like you said, they could easily be purchased.
Kind of going off from this, I think it'd be nice to have an estimate of cost for gears for the tiers.
I know that the things written in the guide is based on your personal research, experience, and preference, and I do agree with most of it. However, as a guide, I think it has to be flexible and be able to account for numerous situations, like for those with less money. I tried to start a general gear (and character progression) guide (accounting for races as well), but it became too complicated for one person to finish in a forum, and I get the feeling that this guide will be very long too. Maybe you can turn it into a google doc and work with others, like Kinsoo and his friends did? I can help, and throw my old guide in that was never finished.
Here's my old guide. It's a year old, but I think it's still pretty relevant. Maybe I'll start updating this at some point [S]Bringing back necro[/S]
As for cp, this is really subjective, because even in melee areas, people can have different cp for their damage output. For example, my hp is on the low side because I never intentionally ranked hp stuff, and ranked things that gave str only. As a result, I can put out much higher damage than people that usually beat my cp by 300-500, but the lack of hp results in lower cp in general.
It's similar for range. Generally, humans will have higher cp than Elves when it comes to ranging, because the chance is, they'll have more str with relatively similar dex.
As for heavy armor, I'd actually recommend it on lower players, just because they most likely will have very low dex, and heavy armor will deduct very little dex. It's also easy to get balance with heavy armor too.
As I stated above, the tiers and how you think they should go are pretty subjective honestly. I recommended those 2 sets due to the fact that they have decent tanking set effects however you can really use any npc heavy armor for defensive purposes.
As for making it a lot longer and working with other people on it, I'm very disinterested in mabi atm and coordinating with people becomes very annoying like that, and I honestly don't think many people are interested enough to do it. Not to mention as I stated above I'm too busy to make it into a big project like that so I will only be going over things that really I find while researching on wiki, from my own experiences, and from help from a couple of people over a couple of skill sets.