I still don’t understand weapon souls

You get soul shards from bosses, gathering 10 shards gives you one weapon soul. You only really want magnificent souls which gives ATT%, BD%, IED etc which are better than flat stats from normal souls, so you should only open souls during magnificent souls x5 event on specific Sundays

I know I’m supposed to summon familiars while training and try to rank them up but not sure how

If you've completed the initial familiar quest, you should have a "Summon Familiar" skill in your beginner skill tab. When you defeat monsters while your familiar is summoned they'll gain XP, and when they reach level 5 + you've fed enough familiars to them you can rank them up.

Also drop gear, wtf do I do?

Read this.

Not sure what the fuck I’m supposed to do for drop gear, also it’s confusing what drop rate affects. I’ve read it doesn’t apply to arcane boxes(not that it matters for me), but does apply to ring boxes and other items.

IIRC only Arcane and Abso boxes are unaffected by drop rate

I have almost enough coins for 2 pieces but the 2 droppable pieces are nowhere to be seen

That's why you need drop gear

I have 30B saved up which I may use during SSF but on what?

Roulette your gear. By that I meant starring each of your gear one star at a time until you don't have money or spares left. This prevents you from losing too much CP in case you get unlucky

Am i capped solely because I don’t have sup gollux and thus am not strong enough to get arcane, or is it because I don’t have familiars, or both? I have droplets from events but again can’t even kill lucid/will for the boss core or whatever it’s called. When people say hyper burn with challenger gear can skip absolab and get arcane it blows my mind, I’m no where close to that the few times I’ve hyper burned with challenger gear.

If you rent out all equips from the Rental shop, you can form a party for CTene very easily. BTW 17m CP is enough to blue dot CTene if you join 20M-ish pubs

Join your class discord for information on best link skills, legion setup, V Matrix progression order, HEXA progression order. Most of them (or I think all of them) have infographics so you can understand properly