There is 5 basic weapon and armour qualities, Blank, blue, green, purple and gold, this is for all types of weapons and armour.

When getting items and weapons, its important to pay attention to the stats as it is easy to discard a item simply by quality and not realizing that the stats are what is more important, they can be improved with upgrading  quality, refining and enchanting but the level can not be changed.

Now there is also 3 types of weapons and amour. The normal weapons and armour that are dropped in dungeons, the synthed items that can be gained from using scrolls and various items and the set items.

The quickest way to tell is rookie is normal items, soldier, knight etc is synth and tarwen etc is set item.

Update: There was a question asked about the difference between 1h, 2h and bow basic damage.

The answer is that 2h has an average 30% more stats and basic damage than two 1 handed weapons. The dual 1h weapons allow players to have more gem slots. The difference between 2h weapons and bows which are two handed, is that the bow user has less basic damage, this is to allow for the fact that they have a longer attack range and the ability to avoid damage from some melee skills because the melee skill range is less than the range of bow skills, so reducing the basic damage was done to balance out the distance advantage

Lets look at the basic weapons classes first, those are the most common items and drops

Starting with white items, each grade of item has a extra stat. This means that items that are higher in quality can have better stats. The [1*] is the level of stat. The higher the [*} the better the stat. Stats can be re-rolled when doing item refining at the black smith.

Next is the synthed weapons they are created using scrolls that drop in dungeons, the higher the difficulty the increased chance of a random drop of a scroll

Now a synthed item can also drop in the dungeons. They have a partial star upgrade, increased damage

Arguably the best items in the game and also the rarest, is the set items. They are the set items,

This is a basic set item.

This is upgraded to gold quality, so it has the 4 extra stats and if it was also enchanted, it would have a 5th stat