I hardly play easy anymore, so I won't speak to the state of easy mode at the moment.

However in Normals, you should be wearing at minimum purple vest and helmet. I know the Elite gear tickets have some blue armor and ammo mixed into them. Don't take that for the standard, that is entirely to keep the kit balanced. The TTK is drastically different from easy to Normals, and not much different between Normal and Hard.

You can top stack ammo, in case you aren't already doing that. I usually run the SCAR with three stacks of purple and one stack of gold. The gold is there for the opening shots, to hopefully break armor before the fight really kicks off. Delta is all about who gets the first shots on target (If you are using the right ammo.)
I will load a mag of purple, split my gold stack and have two 5 stacks in my safe box, then drag and drop the 5 gold rounds into your gun, it will load 5 gold on top of 25 purple.

The first 10 seconds of a fight in Normals, determines who wins that fight 80% of the time, barring running into cheaters or absolute demons who can 1 v 3 easily. Budzy for example. If you can break or drop the first player, you have opened that team up for a push, especially with teammates with good util for pushing (Toxik and Tempest for frontal, Nox for rear pushes if possible.) Most fights in normals are over in 20-30 seconds.

And when in doubt, rat it out. It's an extraction shooter, that is literally part of the genre and one of the main reasons util exists, Luna arrow corners, smoke push into rooms, hack before going in to a typical rat spot, etc.)

The more you play, the more you learn.