You never have to pay a cent. The game may still let new players believe that gear is locked behind a paywall but most items in the market have blueprints that you build by gathering materials in game and then waiting.

The things you can't buy blueprints for from the in game market are usually from clans which should be free to join (i.e., if someone is demanding you pay them for joining find a better clan) or earned in game during missions.

To be fair it has been a while since I was buying new weapons in the market because I am near level cap so I'm not sure how prominent the "Buy Blueprint" option is compared to the "spend premium currency" option but they did revise those screens to make it more apparent that real money doesn't need to change hands

That being said, if you wanna drop a few thousand I'm sure you can buy every available cosmetic, all the available weapons, all the available characters, the supporters packs, the prime access that's currently available, etc. I made my first purchase at like 500 hours and that was because I really felt they were improving the product better than some Triple A titles were at the time.

Stop by Dormi.zone to see what fans of the series are saying here on Lemmy. Afaik we aren't sanctioned by Digital Extremes but we haven't hit the critical mass of other websites yet so they don't see fit to pay developers to watch these boards.