There's lots of good places to hunt around those levels, especially if you can get grouped. There's still some areas of Stormhold that you can still get some challenge out of, but Thundering Steppes has lots of content in those levels, solo or grouped. Get into a good Ruins Of Varsoon group there and you can get some nice xp. EL is an area that you can start to look at, has lots of little quests for killing X number of mobs to get ya started in your low 30's, and you can get grouped in your low 30's for RunnyEye or RiverVale for some great XP, which are both in EL.
As far as armor quests, there are a few different things that can be done to get stuff, but in Zek, you can talk to one of the NPC's around the fort wall and get the quests for the Emerald Hide armor (chain) and start doing those around 30ish. Decent stuff for free and get some xp while doing it. Hope that helps you out a little, and theres a lot more out there even still.