My wife won't play DCUO cause of the costume coloring feature. She loves the CoH method where you can pick and choose each piece and your color instead of having a theme.
Gears are pretty easy to get so far. Tier 2 is really where it is at
Tier one is not too bad but if you run a lot of hard alerts, you can get some decent gears.
Tier 1 will boost your HP and Power but very little in terms of your class stats. My controller (gadgets) and Healer (sorcery) tier 1 only like 2 pieces really boost my restoration 40+ points (chest, legs) the other pieces I got from hard alert was already blue. Tier 1 are purple
most of them boost my base states like +4 to +9 at most. It is not really a big upgrade.
Tier 2 on the other hand is a whole new class of upgrades