Hey Valafjal.

When I first started, I had a little bit of a hard time figuring out the controls too. Like you, I came fresh from wow.

Since I don't know what you have figured out, I'm just going to start from the beginning.

The first thing you have to do is make sure your abilities are set on the bar. On the right hand side at the bottom of the screen there are some icons. Click the one on the furthest right. Look down to the third line for "Actions and Traits" (In the English version anyway. I don't know what another version might say.) Click it and you will see a line of boxes on the left, and actions on the right. Those are your abilities. The boxes go in order of your keyboard numbers at the top. If your abilities aren't set, go ahead and set them in line 1.

To check your action bar, you can hit "F" to go into action mode. This should make your bar come up.

What makes fighting cumbersome in my eyes, is that it's really easy to be trying to hit commands in passive mode. If you do that, nothing will happen. In wow, all that it takes to be in active mode is to hit an ability. This is not the case in FFXIV. You must make sure you are in active mode to fight. You can tell if you are by looking to see if your weapon is drawn and you are in ready stance.

You can get into active mode a few ways. One is hitting the "F" key. My preferred way is by right clicking the monster. Once in active mode, the easiest way to attack is to hit the number of the ability you want to use. If you are a spell caster, you will also need to hit enter after this.

I hope this helps.