I don't remember all the details, but it' something like that:
Partyplanner recruited me in his guild probably a few days after I started playing and that allowed me to get carried a few climbs.
I probably had about 200-300 fg and he told me to buy some crap from the mp and also told me " you could make ok fg " with fishing, so I started fishing as well.
I bought some 50-60 ee items till about lvl 20/25 and after that I was completely useless in a climb no matter how hard I tried to click.
Some of the people including him probably saw I'm clicking good or whatever and allowed me to be in a few climbs in the passing weeks.
Partyplanner also gave ma a ~100 ee lvl 50 polearm at some point so I could do some sorta dmg after lvl 50 at least.
Then he was asking me to join some climbs more often, but I almost never wanted to because I was feeling super useless.
Instead, I was soloing till about lvl 30 or 35 which must have taken me like 4 hours and I was also starting to fish really hard.
I was selling all the fish I was getting and I was making a couple hundred fg or something every other week.
In the next 2 months I was spending most of the fg ( which wasn't too much ) buying D2 items and getting some cheap upgrades in ladder slasher.
Then I decided to sell some D2 stuff so I could finally buy some sort of average ls items, but I got bored in 2 months, went back to D2 and decided I'll only fish in LS to get some fg for D2.
At some point I almost ditched LS and I didn't play it for months, because I didn't really need fg.
Then about a year after I first started playing ls, I found out about Path of Exile, started playing it and realized I could make a lot more fg there, made about 10 or 15 k and decided I could finally afford to spend fg in ladder slasher so I started checking the mp for items and made some topics.
After I bought most of the stuff and they were semi-decent, I started slashing again and this time doing mainly climbs rather than skilling, because I finally had gear to slash with.
So to sum up, it's thanks to Path of Exile that I'm playing Ladder Slasher and it took me about a year and a half to have "sort of" complete sets for the most part.