Levels are certainly what you need right now. Once you get into the 50s it should be pretty easy to wrangle together a plate house group and farm Kael for Velious armor or join a guild doing HoT. I am not sure on gem pricing ATM but it will probably cost you a couple of K to gather all the necessary gems you need once you get the armor drop pieces you need so keep saving that money.
As mentioned above you have pretty decent gear. Is there better gear? yea but its going to cost you hundreds of thousands of platinum pieces to obtain from EC. Get your levels are you can start gathering that stuff either yourself, or you will start getting items that trade well for other high end items.
Only thing I can really recommend is maybe get the
https://wiki.project1999.com/Atramentous_Shield and its really a side grade compared to the Sarnak Battle Shield.
Fungi would be great, Cloak of Flames would be great, Blood Ember Greaves would be great, Circlet of Shadow would be great, Massive Dragonclaw Shard would be great, HoT armor would be great, Sword of Pain would allow you to sell Ebon Mace....but to buy everything I just listed is probably like 1 million PP in EC tunnel...Get it yourself as you get closer to 60. Hell, even PoH or PoG drops would be upgrades for you past level 46