People lost interest in game and after removing wars many players left the game also we dont have any admins in the server plus they havent said anything to players lately not even a new post in news section. Seems like they have forgotten the server completely.
About the gear you can either buy the green gear from AH and upgrade it to blue with dust and gold or do the quest u will get for armors and then upgrade the gear you aquire from the quest

New daily events were supposed to help, but instead made things worse. You can only be left out of queue so many times before giving up.
Pleas with admin to give us any hope and information have been ignored for months.
Bug reports are dismissed as "user problems" even when the few players left all have the same trouble and use different devices.
Cheating is going unpunished, even a clan chest theft has been ignored. Have a look in the Guardians tab of forum if you want an update on how out of hand things are.

We do thankfully have 1 guard who logs on every now and then to silence the worst chat offenders.

And we have recently seen an update that was done, so silently things are getting change. It is just hard to believe we'll ever see the game as active as it was before wars were taken away.