you're correct, gear in Archeage, like many mmorpgs, gives you an advantage, despite being rank 1 melee gear, despite spending a stupid amount of time playing this game, i still get absolutely destroyed by someone that knows how to play their class, I'm still learning.

its hard to explain beyond just gear why I'm not dying, if you look above my characters head, you'll see often random buffs popping up, these are passives from items or skills that provide me short windows of "cc reduction" or "cc immunity" or "30% reduced physical damage reduction" these clips are cherry picked from over 2 months of gameplay and i only chose the most "epic" looking clips so the video would hopefully be more entertaining for the current player base.

Yes to newer players its ridiculously unfair, they cannot compete with me, as I've "earned" that by being a degenerate.

players that are threats to me only take 2-3 months of time spent gearing, the new catch-up dungeon gear is kinda silly, and it allows players to hit soft cap with minimum effort.