General

Keep saving meso. RA top and hat should be affordable right now. Best thing to do is buy and sell stuff right now. Maybe wait for events. RA set is amazing because you can just spell trace it for HP. It gives a lot of hp too which is a nice bonus the more hp you get.

make sure to scroll your set/gear with spell traces for hp,
just use the 70% options, that should boost your range by a lot

You could just slowly farm the denaros to buy the SW stuff yourself, then cube it yourself. Another option is to trade up by selling unidentified SW accessories, then buying the cheap HP% ones for minimal cost over the unidentified. I usually see 11% hp SW going for about 200-250.
For Ephrenia you will need to finish a 100-110 questline in Ellin Forest. You don't have to finish the Life Spirit quest, that takes forever. You can reenter her room every 30(?) seconds or so, but the drop rate is rather horrid.
Gollux accessories you should just buy yourself using coins from killing normal/easy Gollux every day. The only item I would suggest buying is a Superior Gollux Belt (or Reinforced if you are really strapped for mesos). With a 2nd pendant slot (you can get temporary free one from the Grand Athenaeum dungeon) you can run two Gollux 3 sets.

hmm you can solo horntail with out any prequest since last patch
Ephenia is the boss you are looking for she spwn non stop... in Ellin forest in the same map... the drop rate is just slow... around 3h with x1 drop

Okay, I got the CRA pants and top. Raised my attack range by quite a bit. I am now over 110k range buffed. That's quite a long ways from where I started!

I have about 500m left, with about 150-ish left to sell. I see some %HP Sweet water gear, but it's like 180m-2xxm for 7%. What price should I be looking for? Or is there something else I should buy? I've looked into Gollux sets, but unfortunately one item out of the 3 set is very expensive... I just need to know how to maximize the rest of this money before I start really farming for gear. I did farm up a Czak helmet (three actually... all of the potentials sucked), but it's not that much better than the Belial Devil Horns... while they only have 6% HP, the 5% crit rate is kind of important. Still considering getting the CRA helmet for the huge boss damage buff.

I really wish I could find some Rex earrings. They seem to just have fallen into a black hole and disappeared off of Bera.

I wouldn't mind going for the CHT Pendant, but yeah no friends or guild. >_>;

Edit: Is that soul boss just a normal boss that spawns? How hard is it to encounter it?

Looking up the cape it seems that they used str scrolls on several slots so it probably isn't worth 100 mil when I see clean ones for 30-40 mil on Bera.
The main problem with buying Empress at the moment is that CRA is so much better that the only slots worth buying would be Shoulder/Cape/Boots for the 3 set, and those are the expensive ones. The even more expensive alternative is Tyrants.
At the moment I would try to find cheap rare CRA pants and top, and work on getting a Czak helm for now (or you can get 4 set CRA if you intend on doing normal Gollux and Herb Town voyages earlier). The plus side is Czak helm is very cheap to spell trace for HP.
Just work on getting to Commerci voyages and Gollux easy/normal mode, then it can give you a few mil every day plus get you closer to Sweet water accessories and a Gollux set.

Emp set is pretty useless, save up for the full CRA set.

In the meantime, get 10% hp Czak helmet. Get the 10% hp pendant from CHT. Just get a friend to help get you in on the run.

Ephenia soul is really good as it increases your base hp by 50%. Took me about 1.5 hrs to get all 10 souls using the 2x drop coupon. (Duration 150 seconds, Cooldown 300 seconds).

So the 6 set empress effect isn't actually that useful? I thought 30% boss and 30 attack would go further... sigh. Well dang, to get the 3 set effect I might sacrifice more %hp than I gain...=/ My issue is that Bera is a %hp wasteland. There aren't any Rex earrings for sale at all and virtually no reasonably priced gear with %hp. Doesn't help that I have no friends or guild since I play so on and off.

On the upside some of my stuff sold, so I have 600m to work with (maybe 200 more on the way), not that it looks like it will net me much. I see a 6% hp Lionheart cape for 100m, is that a good buy? Any specific gear I should look for aside from Rex?

I'm working on a crit chance sylph ring.

And thanks a lot for the Ephenia Soul suggestion. This is one of those things that I wish people would tell me about.

Will Chaos Zakum helm be better than my 6% hp event horns considering their DA specific bonuses?

Thanks a lot for the help so far folks.

Get 3 piece Lionheart, start saving up for full CRA.
Grab a buddy and do Chaos Zakum for the helmet, or solo it yourself. It should take you maybe 20 minutes but you shouldn't use need pots so theres that.
Start farming for an Ephrenia Soul.
Do Gollux/Commerci prequests. Make sure you do those every day.
Get Sylph Ring event week 1 done asap. Rex's Earrings can usually be found for very cheap.
Set effects will net you good damage bonuses, you can worry about cubing your CRA/Empress/Gollux etc later.
Get link mules if you don't have them already.
Do Boss Arena for the emblem and Ghost Ship quests in Singapore for the badge.

hi!

The way i geared myself is that I mainly picked out pieces of sets that was just enough to give me a %hp bonus. I don't feel that full set effects are as effective on DA characters than other characters. Or even tyrant items, for that matter.

I currently wear DA event hat (belial horns with hp% potential, with extra att and crit chance),
lv100 top, bottom, shoes (with some hp% potential and set effect),
9th anniversary cape, ring, and face accessory (gum), and belt (all with some hp% potential and for extra 20% hp set effect)
Rex's earrings (10% hp stat by itself without any extra potential, mine has extra 9%hp potential line)
a revolution demon sword that was scrolled +8 with OP event scrolls and then five-stared, and soul-weaponed with ephenia's soul
other accessories I have are crit ring, 9%hp tempest, and absolute ring, and a 9%hp tempest shoulder.

My range sits around 180k fully buffed and I have little trouble with the bosses for the most part.
but I'm not trying to solo CRA or anything.

tl;dr
mix and match for maximum hp%, set effects aren't too important on DA

Get enough pieces of the empress set (lionheart) to get the 15%hp/mp set bonus.
Then after that, just go for %hp stuff.
Buying the emp shoulder is not necessary I'm pretty sure.