Although my experience with pubbies in the game has been pretty positive, I'd reccommend adding the various Bay12 peeps to your friends list - always better to play with people you know.
I'm AlStar in game, feel free to send a friend request.
If you die, your heat goes, but they can't pick it up, also, you can give half your health to someone.
If you revive someone, you'll transfer over 1/2 your health, and get 1/3 of their heat. If you revive yourself, I believe that 1/3 of heat is instead lost (not 100% on that though, you might get to keep it.) While I suppose that particularly heat-hungry, unscrupulous people could try to farm your corpse, it really doesn't seem worthwhile. If you're in a 'group' like that, just click on the party option "play solo" - no need to deal with jerks.
Edit:
I've upgraded both gun and sword to the $3000 tier, but they don't mean a thing. Even the weakest monsters take several attacks to kill. Or was I joining a party in a deep level?
It’s possible you were joining a party that was pretty far down. Also possible is that your new weapon(s) are inflicting damage that the enemies you’re facing are strong against.
One good thing about the proto weapons – they don’t do much damage, but all that damage is ‘normal’ damage, so nothing is weak or strong to it. If you’re using a… hot edge, for instance (50% normal, 50% elemental) against wolvers (strong vs elemental), you’re going to be doing less damage overall then you were with the proto sword.
Edit(2):
Hmm, if you don't pay for crystals, how do you get started?
Use your mist energy to go down t1. Kill all your enemies. Collect loot. When you hit Moorecraft (or run out of energy), head back up and sell all your loot on the AH. If you’ve got enough crowns, buy CE (click on the (-) icon in the bottom right.) Repeat as desired.
On t1, it takes a bit of luck to actually make a net profit if you’re not using mist, but in t2 (assuming you don’t get killed), it’s quite possible to do a full run (80 energy) and come out with enough to buy 100 energy, and then some.
Danger zones can be extremely profitable, but you might want to avoid those for now. As their name suggests, they're not filled with love and happiness.