.... I rarely see anyone complain about energy these days... It's been half a year and you are the first one.

2000 per day, are you insane?

Or are you trying to build Dizzy with 400 spd or what?

Of course you can have gear. You just have to either wait at the gate, the time gate, for more energy to regenerate or spend money. This is just how mobile games are.

All those players at the highest levels of PVP either played since the start of the game or whaled energy to get the gear so they could be there. In a lot of cases I'm guessing both. I have cleared all of regular raid and cleared Auto Tower 100 the last two times. My core units are using very few lvl 85 pieces and mostly the free gear from the Adventure Paths or Abyss.

PVE wise this game is very F2P friendly, but if you expect to compete in the higher ranks of PVP expect to spend some money just like the majority of mobile games with competitive PVP.

And to be clear I've played casually from the beginning until recently.

I don't have any problem with gears, my gears are all sucked, bad, I live on what RNG gave me... spam around 200 ~500 per day, I won't waste my time on hunt w11 when it only drops "rare" gear and bad gears with stupid bad substats. 

I'm waiting for golden hammer. Only do hunt seriously on x1.5 bonus event.

I've been playing since November of last year.  Never spent a penny on this game (or any mobile game for that matter) and currently sitting at 230 leifs in my storage. I've completed all content and special events too. I'm currently in masters in pvp (very ez to achieve even as a free player).  Compared to some of the mobile gotcha games out there this one is very F2P friendly.  As to gear everyone will tell you its just rng and luck, don't need to run hunts all day to get it. Just play alittle and take what you can get. I have several chars at 80k+cp with little more than 2-3 hunts a day depending on what the daily banner event requires.  

I hope the eq system gets changed better as it stands out PvP is decided completely at eq drop and eq enhance. At some point you just swim in useless 85 and 88 gear, trying to be lucky enough to get decent subs and avoid flats.

You buy the hell raid speed weapon and have it upgrade +2 crit chance each time while some other rolls total 30 on speed sub. It is just ludicrous and very...tiring.

I just hope the golden hammer does not introduce a new greater tier of randomness into the mix.