returning player looking for some info

Hello,i recently came back to game after years of break thinking i will have okayish gears but prolly gonna have to catch up with dailies. On my surprise it seems im heavly undergeared compared to nowdays players. My gears are full r9rr +12 with josd and almost fully reawakened x2 warsong set cards.When i quit the game there was 5 people that had nuema portal set cards and now it seems every third person on server has nuema portal set cards and reawekened at least once.(on Tideswell,not sure about other servers). So my questions are: what did i miss?how did so many people get nuema cards that would cost more then 10s of thousands of dollars, is it even worth for me to invest money into the game and try to get somewhat on same level,how much would it approximately cost me or should i just go back to inactivity and look for some other game?Even tho im not big fan of pvp seems everything now days is revolving around pvp and honestly,its not fun to be 3 shot....