To be a good player you should become very familiar with gear swaps and use them as much as possible. Effective gear swaps and attentive playing can make you outperform people with better gear by 50% easily. I have many parses to support this statement. In other words knowing how to use your gear makes a bigger difference than having the best gear.
Although you don't have a lot of selection at level 30, a good way to start becoming acquainted with gear swaps is to make a melee set and a weaponskill set for your SAM (melee focuses primarily on haste and accuracy, WS focuses basically on STR alone for SAM once you get Yukikaze). Then use macros (ffxi, windower, or the advanced spellcast program) to switch between your sets as appropriate. Even before you get that nice AF helmet and macro it is for meditate, you can be macroing in gear for your WSs to make them much stronger and really step up your game.
Another macro I recommend is 'recast'. It would be something like:
/recast "Meditate"
/recast <any other ability you want to keep up to date on>
(shadows, berserk, third eye, sekkanoki)
Just tap that macro every once and a while and you will always be on the ball to use abilities as early as possible.
(Alternatively there are many plug-ins linked to windower that can fill these roles if that is your sort of thing)
Good luck! Your post sets you in the direction of developing as a great player.