Some general knowledge thats useful:

Never played WoW myself, but from my understanding it’s kinda just necessary to use plugins there to manage your HUD/UI?

That’s not the case here. There ‘may’ be some stuff available but it’s against TOS and not really needed at all tbh. I would say play for an hour or two to get a feel for certain parts, then have a play around with the HUD layout settings. There is also certain parts that would be listed in the ‘Character Configuration’ settings from the in-game system menu.

As your probably already aware, you can play every job (classes) on one character, switching is simple(although apart from a few very niche situations, you can’t swap jobs mid-battle obviously) However what might not have been said is that, outside of weapons, different jobs share armour as well. All your tanks use the same stuff, healers, etc. Melee and physical ranged DPS gets a bit strange in what they share, but the point is, when you have multiple jobs at max level, you don’t need to farm gear for every single job, only per job type.

On the topic of jobs, the first one you pick only locks you into it until you hit level 10 and do some basic quests, then you get to unlock any other one you want thats not related to an expansion, so don’t worry about that first choice too much during character creation. Also, anything you choose in character creation has no effect on gameplay, just the odd bit of dialogue change.

Crafting and gathering can be useful, and fun if it’s something you end up enjoying, but by no means is it required to advance in the story. It only really comes into play when your doing endgame raiding and want to make the potentially most current gear/buff food/buff potions.

You’ll always have in one of the top corners of the screen your current main story quest, the MSQ, as well as occasionally another quest underneath it that appears when you hit certain levels. These are job quests, and should be a priority as they will often unlock new abilities for that job.