Screwing yourself out of experiencing the game’s story and leveling process from the beginning isn’t really worth it, even if it’s just to catch up to whatever content your friends have reached, and especially if your goal isn’t to just rush to endgame raiding. Your friends can join you for low level duties since level sync is a thing in this game, and I’m sure they’d prefer that to trying to teach you basic combat concepts in content where you really should’ve learned from your own experience by that point. Just jumping in the deep end like you’ve done is, well, confusing and overwhelming. I recommend going back to square one (or rather, level 1, heh).