I'm on PS3 and when I first started (my first character was GLD as well) I had quite a bit of trouble based on some of the game's default settings. A couple things that made a really big difference when I learned how to set them up:

1) Visual Effects:
I'm not certain if PC is the same, but at least on PS3 battling with a whole group of people and mobs (with default settings) produces so many flashing flaming visual effects that it becomes nearly impossible to see what's going on. In particular I remember that on my first dungeon I had a hard time even seeing which mob was targeted because all those visual effects were obscuring the targeting ring.

To fix this, go into Character Settings. Somewhere in those settings (I don't remember exactly which section it's in and am not at home right now to check but probably under "General") is a three-by-three set of options where you can set visual effects to either full, limited, or none for yourself, your party members, and others. I now keep it set to limited for myself and none for both party members and others. There's still enough effects to keep the game exciting looking, but no longer so much that they obscure everything. It makes a huge difference in playability.

2) Targeting:
There's two ways you can handle targeting with a controller, and the default one doesn't work the best. If you go into the target filters section of character settings, there's a section for setting what you want to target based on whether your weapon is drawn or not, and another section below it for manually choosing what types of things to target.

Disable the top part, about choosing what to target based on whether your weapon is drawn or sheathed. That part is rather buggy and in any case doesn't allow much flexibility if you want to target different things at different times (which you'll eventually want to, at least by the time you start adding additional classes).

Enable the section below it that lets you set up to four targeting groups. Each is configurable. For instance, I have L1+[square] set to switch my system to only targeting mobs (useful when focusing on DPS or tanking). Then L1+[circle] sets it to only targeting players (useful when healing). L1+[triangle] sets it to targeting everything. You could also set one of them to targeting specifically NPCs, or else include NPCs along with players in your healing setup. Once you use the L1+(whatever) to choose a targeting group, then the right/left directional buttons will only cycle between members of that group until you use L1+(something else) to change to a different targeting group.