This all refers to Honor gear, not conquest which has significantly higher honor requirements. Gear still has the same honor cost for upgrades. It’s just too much for entry level gear.
All figures below include the item itself before upgrades.
Helm, chest, legs = 7125 per item = 21375 honor.
Shoulders, belt, boots = 5700 honor per item = 17100 honor
neck, cloak, 2 rings, 2 trinkets = 4325 honor per item = 25950 honor
Weapon = 14250
Total cost for a set at max pvp ilvl = 78675 honor
Now lets say you every bg you win is 500 honor, and every one you lose is 200 honor, which is an average honor of 350 per bg assuming you’re 50/50 win rate optimistically.
To get a full set of gear, you can expect to complete 224 bgs.
Assuming each BG conservatively takes 12 minutes, that’s 44.8 hours of GAMEPLAY.
Assuming you’re an avid gamer and play 4 hours a day, spend 6 minutes in a queue, and then play your 12 minute game, you can expect to get 15 bgs in per day. This is assuming you do LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE like your dailies, torgast etc. JUST spamming bgs.
Using these very very conservative figures, it’s going to take you 15 days of spending literally 100% of your time dedicated to BGs to get the BASELINE set to be competitive.
Long story short. Make the gear 1 rank. It’s really not hard.