It's not easy being an adventurer. I'm a front line fighter, and my life depends on building and maintaining a reliable set of armor.
The buy-in is a bit expensive because quality equipment doesn't come cheap. Sure, you can buy some bargain basement chainmail and spend a lot on an enchanted sword, but the first veteran kobold you go up against might poke a spear right through that cheap and flimsy mail and punture your liver. Your healer will get pissed if they need to keep wasting their mana to heal a cheap bastard that won't get decent gear. That fancy magic blade isn't any good if you're dead.
A real pro will sink what they can into armor, and then work with an inexpensive weapon for the time being, it is easy to get a weapon drop in the Deep Unknown, but armor on the other hand isn't so simple. Human-sized protective gear is rare to stumble across since most creatures either don't wear armor or they are so damn big that their heavy metal and bone protective gear isn't worth dragging out into the daylight. Every idiot that got the bright idea to loot a set of heavy ogre platemail has ended up dead.
Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash