Am I at a disadvantage

[Estellios]

Just get a keyboard for typing and you will be perfectly fine. Tons of hardcore players are clearing everything on PS3 and PS4. It's best to stick with a control setup you are used to and arrange your actions so that they become intuitive for you. You have a lot of customization even with the gamepad UI.

Also, just FYI, the devs do all their encounter testing/tuning on gamepads.

[Rufalus]

you can use keyboard and mouse on ps4 if you prefer. I play on pc and I still use a gamepad anyway.

[MeganLynn]

The mouse speed on PS4 is insanley slow to me and I don't believe there's a way to increase it. Maybe something SE could look into fixing!

[Niwashi]

some classes you're gonna want more than 16 skills available so switching bars can be clunky

HotBar - limited to 16 can be a pain. But you can mitigate this. Its only a tap of R1 to change.

As for 16 slots...

Not quite sure why so many people are talking about 16 slots. You have 32 slots before you need to start dealing with switching cross-hotbars. 8 with R2 combos, 8 with L2 combos, 8 with R2+L2 combos, and 8 with L2+R2 combos. You can also choose within increments of 8 how many of them should be class specific.

(Personally, I use 8 shared slots and 24 class-specific ones on my initial main hotbars. Then some classes get an extra set of 16 slots by switching hotbars. It's possible that SMN/SCH might need a couple extra sets by the time I reach endgame, because of the additional pet commands.)

[ruskie]

Not quite sure why so many people are talking about 16 slots.

Because not all of us use the extra slots for various reasons - and it can generally be accepted that the default configuration is for just those 16 oslts..