Beginner help needed badly

Everything seems doable without any of the T2/T3 stuff with the right approach (I have yet to craft anything, and I'm allocating most of my play time, which is a lot recently, to this). This is very important to note and to remind ourselves regularly.

Some mats (thinking about 2 in particular that you will see in a lot of recipes, I don't even know if I can mention them here hehe) will require you to master your fighting skills quite a bit, and I'm not only talking about getting 120 swords/archery/parry/healing/spells etc. (which would be a good start), just how you handle your character, what spells you use, how you manage self healing etc.
If you're not comfortable with melee try a pet for tanking, there are cheap human bios for sale around 200-500k, that's 1-2 newbie champ, equip him with Forsaken armor and cheap stuff for a start, keep in mind pets will only get you so far though (aren't worth much for champing and some monsters just melt them instantly), the only pet worth using in end game is a human bio with T2+ armor but we/you won't have this luxury anytime soon.
Others are just long to get and, frankly, impossible to guess where they are found without being told about them or randomly finding them (you may have killed the monster several times and it didn't drop for example, or you thought it was yet another quest item, or found the place but not stepped on the right tile): "explore a lot" seems to be the main advice that I have to keep following myself too hehe.
Remember if you want to craft anything you have to find the recipe first.

So a good start, as Greenlief said, would be to get good custom items first (robe/sash/boots etc., eventually completing with a few pieces of custom armors) to raise stats (I aimed at 220+ DEX, currently at 270 which is more than I need), most of them are found during quests and exploring common areas that are in your travel books. If you're the one I helped yesterday and the other day, you should have a decent whirlwind weapon to handle most of the champs depending on skill and stats, the easiest being the newbie champ or course (but doesn't drop any PS, just gold farming), Baracoon and the crafter champ (the next step being Rikktor, all the others are more difficult). Beware of the first wave during the Baracoon champ spawn, you DON'T WANT to use your weapon on the slimes, they will break it quite fast, use AOE magic for this wave.

Since T2 weapons are so hard to make (some harder than others) and not that powerful for the work required (in my opinion), I would just skip them and craft myself a good weapon from a nice artie or a very nice self dropped weapon that you enhance with money (at the ressource center), don't spend too much on it since it will be a "temporary" weapon (months?). I chose to enhance a bit my whirlwind weapon so I can champ fast and clear groups, my single target weapons are still poor self found weapons with a bit of mana leech. If you need durability consider farming a bit of powder of fortification with small BODs (check Google for BODs rewards), it doesn't take that long once you know where to farm BODs.

Let's keep at it and we will get there eventually.
Good luck!

I am just giving the Jano post some love, so newer players can see a new post and read it maybe...he makes good points in his post that could be helpful.