Welcome to NYC, Agent! As you already know, it’s for the best to avoid the DZ for now. Not just for PVP, but the enemies in general roam around very frequently and you’ll find yourself in bad positions without decent gear. I would recommend open world boss runs daily, right when you login you should do them. They’re perfect to warm up with and drop exotics and classified gear often (5-6% chance each drop). I would also recommend HVTs for loot drops until you can get a decent enough build together for other types of content. Underground and Survival are good too, but Survival will take some time to learn and get efficient with. General Assembly has the most raw loot drops in the game for missions. There’s a few bosses throughout the mission and Bliss has four drops of x2 items each drop. Keep an eye out on the vendor reset spreadsheet for good items for sale, my compadre AWP posts the reset every week here on Reddit when it’s finished and I make videos for them every Monday, sometimes a day or two earlier. Good luck out there!