Alright, managed to play a Mesmer to lvl 11 so I can say a little bit more. First off, I'm an idiot. I was using the Free Camera mode and it was designed to work the way I was complaining about. That's a little saddening because if you don't use Free Camera mode, the environment tends to block your vision of your character, which can get annoying, so I simply had to get used to always using the mouse to change directions. Increasing mouse sensitivity and camera speed helped with that.

You very quickly gain access to every skill you'll ever have in the game simply by equipping weapons and using them. Your non utility skills are tied to weapon sets, and you have access to 5 such skills at any given time. Weapon swapping allows you to have two weapon sets that you can swap between, allowing you to have access to two sets of 5 skills. In combat, weapon swapping invokes a 9s CD. This opens up a lot of tactical options and makes for some very deep gameplay.

The PvE side of things is a bit easy seeing as I can easily take on things 2 to 4 levels higher than myself thanks to the ability to dodge stuff, so I've been focusing on making different combinations of attacks work and just seeing what's possible. I'm going to keep doing this until level 20, and then try out some PvP.