It seems sandbox that you get very attatched to gear. So here is my challenge to you. Use ONLY stuff you can get by yourself, start adventuring far out to get harder stuff. Now you can PK for gear, but go on no trips to get stuff.
This does two things. Most importantly it teaches you to rely on your skills for pk, not your gear. It also will force you to learn the lands better. About the only faction that cannot be easily done solo is magic, and it can still be done alone. Try this for a while, and you will begin to see that gear is assistance, not assurance.
you'd actually be surprised how little i care about gear, the problem is melee kinda depends on gear, more specifically weapon selection. Even if i do use the right weapons its hard to kill someone with a lvl 30 spear. I've been using a ranger staff for darn near a month now, when i finally got anything decent and started to pk with it i get targeted, which i guess is the point of the whole rare system, but i've caught a few people looking at me at low lvls silently and asked them what their reasoning was most didn't reply, one guy even said " you should feel honored i even thought it necessary to look at you most people do not warrant me to keep an eye on them." this toon was under lvl 30 at the time. Why the heck should a lvl 30 need to keep an eye on my gear? I seriously doubt any of these people were looking for my description and you can rp just fine without looking at someone's gear.
There's paranoid and then there is just naive...