Albion Online Dev Tracker

Playing through steam has some disadvantages that may or may not hinder your gameplay:

• You can only connect one account (so up to 3 characters) to it. For more you'd need to use the native launcher.
• Purchases in the ingame shop are more expensive since steam takes a cut on every transaction. To circumvent this you could make purchases directly though the Albion Online Shop.

Apart from that the steam version works just as fine. You may sometimes run into issues if there's some steam-specific outage or bug but then you can still log in through the native launcher with your same account details.

No, there is no downside if you do it another players island. Just keep in mind that they could remove your permissions at any given time.

Outside of personal islands you can use focus on any Crafting and/or Refining you do.

Also with the new awakened weapons, you can use focus to reduce the attunement cost of a weapon.

As far as I know there are no weapons besides offhand but for gear you pretty much have an option for every piece of equipment:

• Assassin hood - channeled ability that greatly reduces your cooldowns.
• Royal jacket - An aura that reduces cooldowns and gives attack speed, can give the bonus to allied players as well.
• Any leather shoes - refreshing sprint slightly reduces cooldown while giving a decent amount of movement speed.
• Food options: Omelettes are the biggest one for cooldown reduction, you also have specialized omelettes like ava or crab that give other bonuses for a slight reduction. Then there's Eel stews which are a mix between stews and omelettes. Theoretically some fish but omelette is always the better option there.

There is surely a lot of information advanced players can gather from you.

• It starts with your guild or rather no guild, which gives away that you don't have any hideouts or territories that offer you a safe zone (means easier way to gank).
• Your gear gives away what kind of content you do. PvE gear usually means you are an easy target without a lot of extra loot, escape gear means you may be carrying something important and group PvP gear might mean that you're not alone.
• An addtional check on the stats can give away how experienced you are in PvP or in terms of crafters or gatherers, how much you might have in your backpack.

No, the silver that drops is actually a part of the silver you lost when your equipment got damaged.

From personal experience I'd say you'll see mostly 1000-1100 IP in stalker due to strong soft cap and around 1300-1600 IP for slayer since it has 50% soft cap.