Hey Gerbil. Most of the primary quests are fairly evident. You will eventually make it to the missions which will have a "enter mission" button at the bottom of your party window. Keep an eye on your "L" menu for active quests. Anything critical to continuing training or the story line should be there. When you start working on secondary professions, you can do the training for each of them and finish the line before moving on to the next, or skip out at any time if a particular line isn't your cup of tea. In Factions, until you pick your secondary profession, most of the stuff you run into is pretty low level/easy. At the beginning, in the Monastery, the story line basically goes:
- Initial intro training
- Talk to your headmaster
- Do primary profession quests
- Talk to Togo
- Try out secondary professions
- Complete quest line to open up option for that one as secondary
- Try other secondaries, if you want
- Talk to Togo to pick secondary and get quest to first mission.
Once you've finsihed the first mission, run around the town you end up in and pick up any quests, usually the one that leads you to the next point in the story will be right in front of you when you complete the mission.
For side quests, they will never disappear for your character and if you miss one, you can go back and pick it up or complete it if you have it in your log, at any time.
As for starter weapons, there is no reason to keep them, drag them to the trash can icon in your "I" menu to destroy it as soon as you find something with better stats.
When you start to evaluate weapons, there are a few "greens" (color of item name when you hover your mouse arrow over it) available on the island. Those are not max damage, but great weapons in the earlier parts of the game. Only bosses (creatures with glowing aura) will drop them and if you find one (a bow for you unless you use another secondary) it will likely be the best you will find until after the first mission. Below green, gold colored lettering is the next best (and occasionally equivalent) followed by purple, blue then white. This is just a general guideline though, until you get to the higer level areas, you may find a blue colored item that is better than a gold one. Later in the game, after you have left the island, any green weapons will be "Max" and offer the best stats for a particualar attribute and upgrade set.
There are no epic quest items in Factions that if you delete or sell you won't be able to complete some end-game quest.
Really, the most important items to watch for drops at your level is to save crafting materials and rare crafting materials. It is rare, but occasionally a ruby may drop, these are very valuable and can be sold to a rare material trader in an major city (Shing Jea Monastery, Keineng Center, House zu Heltzer, Cavalon or an equipped Guild Hall) or saved in your material storage. I would recommend making use of the material storage to avoid cramping your character storage with crafting materials. Many of these crafting materials may be used to make better armor as you progress and until you hit max armor (70AC per piece for ranger), these supplies will be in short supply for you. Not all the crafting materials will be needed for all professions and not all materials have uses yet, like the rubies.
Please feel free to ask more questions or whisper me in game.