Which armour and weapon to craft

Pre Level 30 you won't have to care about what armor you use, just use whatever  you find.
After that you will want to use the blue schematic weapons and armour, Rogue, Carnifex, Guardsman sets.

Using purple schematic armour is extremely rare, you can go 2000 hours without getting a schematic.

how to get materials

You can get some materials from the weekly quests and Expeditions, But the place to get the majority of your materials is strangely the mount vendor. You buy green horse equipment of him and salvage it at the armourer for a ton of materials.

You can get everything you need this way including powdered silver.
Different horse items give different materials when salvaged so i advise you to learn which gives which materials.

Riveted Saddle gives the most amount of powdered silver per bronze spent.

reconditioning and repair

When you play battles your gear will lose durability when you take damage.
You can repair the durability but every time you do so you will lose some permanent durability.

At a certain point the gear will have so low durability it will have a permanent stat nerf.

So what you have to do is recondition it to fully replenish the permanent durability.

To recondition you need just as much materials as if you made a new gear piece, but there's a fun little bonus.

Once you reconditioned your gear piece you get the option to save the old rolled stat bonuses or keep the new ones.

This way if you get a better piece you can save it and if you get a worse piece you can use the old one.
which stats to go for on the gear?

For armour you will want as high values as possible in all stats, HP and Def.
You also want to save all gear you get with leadership on it as this is very valuable lategame.

For weapons you want specific rolls depending on your class, check which rolls you want in the hero guides up top

which horse items to salvage

The best item to salvage for silver powder value per bronze/silver spent is the Riveted Saddle.

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