To be fair to the OP, I decided to try out exp at R1 on my fishing mule. He's got no dow or dol at all.
I'd say it is extremely difficult now if you have no cross class abilities to fall back on. Say you started LNC, and just leveled LNC, it would be brutal.
My advice OP, is to take a deep breath, and just buckle down and grind ur dow and dom classes to 15, then move forward with your main choice. Even at 50, any one of my classes would be very hard to play without cross class actions to depend on. The same is true, if not more so at low levels. With the stat adjustments (they aren't just to us, in case you didn't take notice) it makes low level battle way more difficult if you're doing your first job.