Make sure that you don't over-loosen anything......that'll do more harm than good in itself. The main gear should have the tinyest little bit of side to side play between it and the drive pinion. An easy way to check it is to slip a piece of paper in between the two, then tighten them down.

Also, your tail belt needs to be reasonably tight. You should be able to use light finger pressure to push one side of the belt (the part you can see), to about 3/4 of the way to the other side. If it's too loose, it'll shred itself when it walks around on the pulleys.

In regards to your pitch, you probably want to start out by setting up your swashplate to allow it to travel between -9 degrees to +9 degrees of pitch. hopefully you have a pitch gauge. When you're at mid point on the throttle/pitch stick, your pitch should be zero, and your throttle should probably be around 60%. That should give you ample rotor speed and ample pitch to hover at a little under 3/4 stick. Some people like their helis to lift off into a hover at center stick, which doesn't make any sense.

Something else I think is important to do is to set your pitch curve in the normal mode to be something like this: 40,45,50,75,100, or in your case with a 3 point curve: 40,50,100. Maybe you have it set up that way anyway, but I thought it might be good advise because it helps to prevent some really hard crashes. With a pitch curve like that, if you need to shut your throttle down quickly, you don't drive your heli into the ground when you return your stick to the zero position, because it's not allowing you to go to -9 degrees pitch.