New to the game seeking advice

Hello, i?m new to this game and I have to say its a rather unusual game. The first time I played it till level 12 I realized I was doing something wrong, and after scanning the forums I realized that instead of taking my time to raise my guide PT?s I was rushing to do the quests, especially after figureing out that the quest log only holds 5 quests and if you get more than 5 levels above a quest its gone for good. Needless to say I deleted and started from scratch. As I played through the second time, I got further by taking my time and building my pt?s of (and I should point out i?m playing a Cora Spiritualist) defense, followed by all 5 of my skill force schools, and then if I had time (on the xp bar) left over, i?d try to raise something else. Mind you by doing this I had a pretty steady of incomeing disena and gold, though at the expensive of pretty well ignoreing all quests and never bothering to read any of them. I thought this was going well until I read a few more new learner guides and realized that I might want to raise my ranged. seems it helps with ranger armor and the like and makes leveling the summons easier while raiseing force points. so I started over a third time. Here?s where i?m getting into the bind and need the advice on.

I?m finding that there?s simply not enough time on the xp gage to raise everything to max before I level and the cap limit goes up again. I always get my defense up (and work on shield at the same time as defense) and then I work on my magic to get it up as well (all 5 elements) but I usually run out of exp before I can get to work on ranged. so the question is this, knowing ahead of time that I wish to go Spiritualist - Summoner - Glacier (or however you spell it) should I then in fact worry about ranged skill..and if so should I work on getting ranged up first BEFORE I work on my mage skills? my thinking on this is that force spells tend to do a pretty amount of damage based on the wand and it probabbly wont take as long to get the force caught up as say...a ranged weapon. But i?m sort of confused where I should work on first. Its unusual to be raceing the xp bar for progression, and its still a race surpriseingly even though i?m focusing my attention on the lowest monsters I can find that give me xp, and then useing them to build up my pt?s at a slightly slower pace, but at a pace that doesn?t eat up the xp bar before I can build them up.