For starters I agree, you gear is lacking. As advised above, use your commendations to buy modifications. The first thing to aim for is getting the highest level/best quality hilt in your main hand as possible. Most of your damage multiplies from this. You haven't given many details on what you actually do.. I personally used T7 all the way untill I got Doc. I'd send him in first to the silver mob, so he'd body pull everything else, then I'd burn down all the weak mobs asap. Then finish off the silver.

I was combat for the first 30 levels or so. Had no problems. The guy at the end of act one, one word: Interupt! Even as combat with 8s CD and no 0y jump you can still keep his big hitter interupted. Do that and he's easy. I killed him with 75% health left and kira on full. This is essentially true of all the "Caster" style bosses. "Melee" style bosses seem to be much more about raw DPS output, proper use of defensive CDs and correct companion. Saying that, once I got into early 30s I started having real issues with Golds my own level. That first quest of chapter 2 kicked my ***. So I gave watchman a go. End of problems. Better interupts, self healing and much better damage brought it back to fun times. So watchman made things easier, but I still had to be careful. I could kill any normal group, or gold, but if I messed up and pulled more than I meant to, I was dead. Getting Doc changed all that. Normal groups/golds were easy, I had no down time between them, and if I did mess up, I still had a good chance of making it thru anyways.

That's a bit missleading... Extra power will mean when you do crit, you crit harder... So yes power does very much have synergy with crit and surge.. It's like a chain. As pointed out above it all depends on scaling factors. For example, those relics with the use that increases crit and surge by X amount for Y seconds. Both surge and crit are increased by the same numeric value, but when I pop mine, my crit increases by 5% and my crit damage bonus increases by 16%... So it is simply missleading to say "I think crit is better because I like to hit harder more often" without seeing what those values actually do. I am also leading towards: Strength > hit cap > power > surge > crit. Purely hypothesis tho.

Do pacify and pommel strike work in pvp?