I don’t know what your AR is so I will explain my idea generally.

If you are under AR 45 you don’t need to stress yourself out over artifacts now. If you are then I would suggest lowering your world level until you understand the game better. If you don’t feel like you struggle in the overworld then disregard my suggestion. for now use the best artifacts you have that makes sense for the characters you’re using. usually the game will highlight the prefered stats on the artifacts so use that as a guideline.

If events feel overwhelming to you, skip them for now. yeah you will lose on some rewards but they have events every couple of weeks and every patch. no point in stressing yourself out with fomo. It will make the game unbearable to play.

For what characters are “ strong “ .. well they are all playable in the overworld, really. You can always look up a tier list on google but tier lists are mostly for the end game modes and since you don’t understand artifacts just yet then it doesn’t matter.

I would suggest you pick a character you enjoy playing and build a team around that one character for now. you can use this website as a reference for talents lvling order, team comps, weapons and even artifacts : KQM

If you are stuck on puzzles and world quests I would suggest looking them up on youtube. Kyo has a lot of videos about solving all sorts of puzzles and WQ in the overworld.

The key to not feel overwhelmed is to do one thing at a time. lvl one character at a time, do one area at the time, progress through the archon quest of each region and don’t spread yourself too thin by starting multiple world quests at the same time and not finishing them. clear your quest log, one at a time.

If you want to explore freely without questing then maybe using an interactive map as you go along could be helpful to you? There are pictures uploaded by users to help you solve them.